There are two flavors of the patriarchal view of female sexuality, which I’d deem the “masculine” and the “feminine”, or at least the “controlling” and the “tragic” views. The former is the one that rises to the top in most anti-choice materials, particularly of the abstinence-only education sort, though they do try to soft-pedal it, mostly by changing the word “punishment” to “consequences” in materials meant for the non-fundie eye. If I were to describe it, I’d say the masculine philosophy of female sexuality is, “God gave women a virginity as a treat for their husbands, properly selected as their fathers, so that these husbands can get the thrill out of symbolically dominating you through blood and pain on your wedding night. If you deprive your husband and master of this right by having sex before marriage, god will punish you with STDs or unwanted pregnancy.” I call it the masculine view, because it’s the view that puts men at the center of it, and its about their rights and their domination, and it’s unforgiving to women. But a lot of women have this take on it—look at pretty much any conservative female writer or official face of an anti-choice organization (women hate women, too, so it’s not sexist! is the message there).
The feminine take is mostly a reaction to the punishing attitude of the masculine take. It’s a way to understand the injustice that is the punishing attitude towards female sexuality by displacing responsibility from the men who get a rise out of dominating women onto god and nature, and make it seem like female suffering is just a woman’s lot in life. This soft-pedaling comes mainly from women trying to make nice with the patriarchy. It kind of goes like, “Women’s lot in life is to suffer. Blame Eve, or accept that god made it so out of necessity and wishes that it could be another way. But in order to remind us daily of our submission and gratitude towards our male masters, our sexuality is about suffering. Virginity loss, pregnancy, menstruation—all pain and misery, how can you deny it? Sex itself is the tragedy of a woman’s life. You have to do it in order to fill your role and please your master, and maybe you can eventually come around to getting the joy that is the joy of a job well done.” Sex is constructed as worship, but of male power more than god, and the pain and sacrifice is part of the display of lowliness that allows you to approach the holy.
This is what Huckabee was talking about when he talks about god-ordained sexual expression. There’s some room for female pleasure as a value nowadays—in the 1970s, the LaHayes even wrote a Christian sex manual that treated female orgasm as a non-optional goal of married sex–but the general belief that female bodies were made to suffer and submit hasn’t budged. That some women (like me) insist that female sexuality is owned by women, and should be disposed of by the rightful owners in a way that is pleasing to ourselves first and foremost offends those who take the masculine view, and mostly confuses the ones who take the feminine view—how can you not see that women’s lot is to suffer?
The second, feminine view is less hateful and thus more palatable to the mainstream audience, which is one reason that Caitlin Flanagan’s big-eyed, melodramatic articles about women’s miserable lot in life tend to land her bigger gigs than she’d get if she gruffly wrote, “Do the crime, do the time.” Her latest article made me sad for her, since she seems to really hate being a woman on a fundamental level, and she’s completely convinced herself that the suffering of womanhood is because of essential biology, not because of oppression. As such, she delivers a striking misreading of the movie Juno.
THE movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”
Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.
But the movie proceeds to argue that Juno not only didn’t do anything wrong, but that her life is not horribly damaged by having sex. She ends up with the boy! The baby makes another woman happy! My take on the movie is that the pregnancy is a giant MacGuffin and a security blanket—a way to punish the heroine just enough that the audiences (more likely the studio executives) can swallow a story that’s really about how even loud-mouthed hipsters who don’t agree that they need to say “when” can be loved, and you don’t need to be virginal, personality-less, or a stick-in-the-mud like the heroines of roughly every other romantic comedy out there. The last shot was the story of the movie: Look, I had sex and all I got was a boyfriend who loves me. You know, that thing that’s supposed to be impossible for the dirty whores of the world.
I agree with Flanagan that adoption is not nearly as easy as the movie makes it out to be, and now that teenage girls have the option to say no, they generally do. The percentage of unmarried white women who gave birth that gave up their babies was hovering around 20% in the 60s, and it’s somewhere below 1% now, from what I understand. What’s changed is abortion, sure, but more importantly, it’s considered immoral to kidnap or shame a pregnant teenage girl into hiding in a maternity home and turning over her baby whether she likes it or not.
And that’s why “Juno” is a fairy tale. As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure, and for some adolescent girls it constitutes part of their first gynecological exam. I know grown women who’ve wept bitterly after abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were. How much harder are these procedures for girls, whose moral and emotional universe is just taking shape?
The problem with arguing that something is a “fairy tale” is that it usually ignores that once you strip away the magical elements (the baby was that easy to give up! the fairy godmother showed up at the right moment!), there’s usually a story underneath that’s got themes the storyteller does intend you to take seriously. In “Cinderella”, the theme is that women who show proper submission and humility will be rewarded in the end. In “Juno”, the story is that women who don’t show proper submission and humility may hit some bumps in the road as they come into themselves, but they will usually be just fine in the end. Juno’s character arc was about how she realizes that sarcasm and wit are no substitute for genuinely standing up for yourself, and once she learns to stand up for herself, things start improving. She gets the boy, because she learns to quit hinting and start talking. She realizes that she doesn’t have to submit to the married-couple-picket-fence fantasy for her child and can make her own judgments on whether or not a single mother is appropriate for her baby. Sex and pregnancy are MacGuffins to move the story, but the real story is about finding your own voice. (Why do you think she’s singing at the end? DUH. Here’s an anvil.) It’s true that pregnancy, especially one you bring to term, is nothing to sneeze at, but the larger theme of the movie—that it’s not having sex that makes young women unhappy, but being afraid to speak up and grow up that does—is absolutely true, and that’s why I think audiences are eating it up.
I get the impression that Flanagan is dismissing that message—the belief in female agency—as a “fairy tale”. Wait, I don’t get the impression. I know it. Check out this stinker:
This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
Your life depended on your marriage prospects, you had no vote, no right to go to college, and if you were working class, increasingly you were sent to work in factories that worked you to death for demoralizingly low pay. You got to wear binding underwear and were often underfed and malnourished. But hey, your “chastity” was protected! Too bad it wasn’t for you that chastity was a big deal, but for men and their right to dominance. Young women really benefited from Victorian obsessions with virginity. You can get that strong impression from reading some George Eliot—drowning was actually a metaphor for how great it was to live in that atmosphere! Yeah, I feel women have lost so much.
But I suppose if you feel, as Flanagan feels, that women’s lot is to suffer not to strive, then the loss of the vague and disingenuous protection in exchange for actual freedom is a great tragedy. She ends the article with an image of a high school girls’ room with the word “Please” carved in the wall, and hints that it’s a prayer for a return to the real freedom of shackles for women. I suspect the truth is much more mundane.
Joan Walsh clues into the creepy part of Flanagan’s wailing about how being female is the ultimate indignity (I argue that “victim” is something you become when someone actually victimizes you, but god forbid we actually talk about something like that, because there’s the off-chance that much of women’s suffering comes directly at the hands of men who feel entitled to abuse and misuse, and mentioning that fact is so old school.) and how such natural suffering makes Flanagan supposedly feel “maternal”:
I hate to personalize things too much, but I would also add that Flanagan, who’s built her career persona around alarmist tales of mothering, has twin sons. It’s tragic to me to think she sees girls as such victims; I hope her boys aren’t picking up on her pessimism.
Exactly. God, exactly. As I noted at the top of the post, the notion that women are born victims of god and nature is both a coping strategy but also a way to excuse the actual abuse dished out onto women. Men who see suffering as a woman’s lot aren’t strongly motivated to avoid causing female suffering—if sex with her is making her cry, then we can pretend that’s because a woman’s lot is to submit and cry, and not, oh, that you’re causing her unnecessary pain and quite likely raping her. This debased view of women, that we’re born to be miserable and submissive, makes women properly not objects of respect but of loathing for men. You can feel pity or contempt or hatred for someone whose role is submissive, but you aren’t going to respect them. Nor are you going to take genuine abuse of them seriously, like you would if it were dished out on someone who has a right to dignity.
58 Responses to “Woe to she born with a uterus”
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I had twins when I was seventeen. I gave them up for adoption when they were born to a wonderful family but in no way was it easy. I haven’t seen the movie Juno yet but since it is making so much noise in the blogs I read, I think I might go check it out. As far as this woman who wrote the review of Juno I happen to strongly disagree with her I had sex at a young age and I am not damaged, shamed or any of that. As far as giving my children up I feel quite good about the decision my boyfriend at the time and I made. We knew we weren’t ready for parenthood so we got to make a couple who had tried for years to have a baby and couldn’t quite happy. I ended up not with my then boyfriend but getting an education, making something of myself and finding my soulmate years later.
So giving up a child you can’t properly care for is too hard, abortion is evil, single mothers are reviled and don’t get any support, females who take charge of their own sexuality are gyping males of their rightful, Victorians valued women and girls and we should all pine for those golden days of yore, and all women are noble victims. How does one person live with this much cognitive dissonance?
An additional consequence (perhaps unintended) of treating all women as victims is that women are then socialized to see victimhood as normal, meaning that they are less likely to take the necessary steps to reduce the likelihood of being a victim.
It encourages learned helplessness.
Great article - even if the title says ‘woe’ while the link says ‘whoa.’
That’s my favorite homophone in the English language.
Flanagan’s nonsense makes me so mad. Because we cloak sex for women (particularly vaginal intercourse) in such as veil of mystery, teens are not making good decisions before they become sexually active.
Think you might want to have intercourse - don’t forget to bring your condoms. Instead, teens get “swept off their feet” rather than make a conscious decision to have sex.
This seems to be an American problem - do other western countries have the rates of teen pregnancy that we do?
“you don’t need to be virginal, personality-less, or a stick-in-the-mud like the heroines of roughly every other romantic comedy out there.”
There’s something I’ve noticed recently. Romantic comedy movies where the heroine is supposed to be “fun” and “funny” almost always have her humour come out of clumsiness. I have yet to see her be funny out of wit. But I do see the almost debilitating clumsiness that is supposed to make them “cute.” An example that I’ve seen recently is Good Luck Chuck.
Isn’t it interesting that the only way a woman is allowed to be funny is by hurting herself? The clumsy girl is totally non-threatening (unlike the witty girl). She’s infantilised by her clumsiness, which is what makes her “cute.”
I’d give anything to see a Romantic Comedy that didn’t make me feel shitty about myself afterwards.
I read Flanagan and had to zip over here for a reality check (I knew you’d have one!)
Flanagan paints a stark world with two options — preganancy and abortion. Of course, that leaves out the big wide world of BIRTH CONTROL that can keep most teens safe most of the time. So why isn’t the article about birth control? Isn’t that the thing that would protect teens from the nasty world Flanagan describes? Guess it is too empowering to fit in with the victim meme.
She’s a classic concern troll. Go away Caitlin. I am not sure what motivates here but she’s surely not rooting for our team.
One of the biggest shocks of my genealogical research was finding that in 1913, my great-grandmother had a son and then gave him up for adoption. She was 28, a mother of 6 and newly widowed (within months) when she got pregnant. After my great-grandfather’s accidental death, she and her children moved in with her parents, who raised my grandmother. The next farm over was that of her second cousin and his family, including a 16 year old son.
When she found she was pregnant, Great-Gram remarried quickly (to a cousin of her first husband) and they briefly moved 200 miles away to avoid a scandal. There she had the boy, falsely putting her current husband down as the child’s father, and then gave him up for adoption. She had 4 more children with her second husband and no mention of this child was ever made. (Another family researcher had been contacted by descendants of this boy and DNA tests were done between them)
My grandmother’s memoirs, written when she was 90, tell of playing with an adopted younger boy from the next farm. What Grammie never knew was that this friend was actually her half-brother. The grandparents of the boy adopted him and their son left the area permanently.
I had always heard how hard-hearted my great-grandmother was and it may have been true. She lived to 99 and all accounts were that she was a miserable, difficult woman. But since then, I have felt bad for her- one bad decision to have unprotected sex with a teen boy forced her into marrying rapidly a man who later tried to molest her daughters. He was by all accounts a worthless and abusive drunk.
She later lost her eldest child to that bastard- to avoid his advances, the 18 year old girl hid in the cold woods one wet November evening and died soon afterwards. No wonder Great-Gram spent the rest of her life hating men and boys, except for her first batch of sons.
Thanks, Yuri. Fixed it.
“however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
Which is why child prostitution was an an all-time high in Victorian London. I’d make a joke about the “deep commitment to girls” in that context, but I just don’t have the heart.
So for Flanagan, freedom is so horrible for women that it would be better to go back to the good old days where patriarchy watched over them, sort of like a helpful older sibling. Kind of like a Big Brother…oops.
Burning Prairie,
It’s like that yes/no mind puzzler your mean older sibling would play with you–where they say, “Yes means no and no means yes…do you want me to hit you?” And then they whack you no matter what you say.
Then having your parents either figure you deserve it, or shake their heads and lament how sad it is that it’s your lot in life to get whacked by someone with more power. And it never occurs to them that the beating itself is the real problem.
Thanks for the story, louise. Perfect example of why the supposed “protections” offered women back then were anything but.
Fantastic post.
properly selected as their fathers
I think you mean “by their fathers”. Also, several people linked to the “whoa” url. You might want to do a redirect.
okay, so kinda unrelated, but: flanagan, i’m pretty sure your heartrending “please” moment existed purely in your head. you know what that “please” meant?
it meant “don’t put your tampons in the toilet. or on the floor.”
jayzus.
i wish the Times had comments. i’m left wondering how many other people got through that treacle-and-tears bit at the end and were left going “wtf, you ‘knew what that meant’? what did you THINK it meant?”
(well. i guess it could have been teen-pregnancy-related, but jeez, that’s kind of a stretch. the location alone to me indicates it had more to do with the janitorial staff’s attempts at stopping blockages than someone’s 90 seconds of pink-line-waiting.)
I bet that PLEASE was taken from a parochial school toilet stall. As in, “Fundy, PLEASE STFU.”
I’ll go further & say she might be Catholic, too. I actually had a fundy Catholic mother stop me to tell me all about how her son was”taught” to masturbate through having a sex ed course in his high school. JFC, these people …should hardly be classified as people. Screaming howler monkeys have more sense.
“There’s something I’ve noticed recently. Romantic comedy movies where the heroine is supposed to be “fun” and “funny” almost always have her humour come out of clumsiness. I have yet to see her be funny out of wit. But I do see the almost debilitating clumsiness that is supposed to make them “cute.” An example that I’ve seen recently is Good Luck Chuck.
Isn’t it interesting that the only way a woman is allowed to be funny is by hurting herself? The clumsy girl is totally non-threatening (unlike the witty girl). She’s infantilised by her clumsiness, which is what makes her “cute.”
AND this is why i cant stand Scarlett Johansson: she maintains that she always turned her feet in pigeon-toed when she stops for the paparazzi, because according to her, it makes her look vulnerable & as so no one will hate her for her beauty or whatever the fuck. She has actually said this on multiple occasions; so i guess people like her arent in any way open to changing things from teh inside, either.
I took the phrase “I thought you were a girl who knew when to say when” to be a plaintive wish that she had used contraception–not never had sex.
Amanda, as usual, unpacks so much stuff from such a tiny sample that I’m left with my mouth hanging open in awe. It takes some thinking through but she has hit the nail on the head–the problem for Flannagan et al is that the whole “babies are sacred” thing is just a cover for “women shouldn’t be allowed to have sex without suffering” and even (truth be told) women shouldn’t be allowed to exist without suffering.
How do I get there? Its embedded in the rage with which they approach the movie Juno. There’s no doubt that the flannagan’s of this world are enraged that Juno the movie called their bluff on the whole pro life but non judgemental about sex thing. We already know that the anti choice movement elevates the notion that pregnant white teens are aborting for convenience over the fact that pregnant married and older women and mothers abort for lots of reasons not related to birth control. Juno accepts that trope but turns it on its head.
Juno says “ok, for arguments sake, I’ll have the baby and give it up for adoption. Now are you satisfied?” Juno says–go for it! have the sex, have the baby and get on with your life. No biggie. Flannagan should be fine with that–she’s nothign if not a right wing libertarian on every other issue so if Juno has the baby and suffers, or has the baby and doesn’t suffer, why should she get her knickers in a twist? Plenty of people suffer for lots of reasons in a conservative world and generally the conservatives look and pass by on the other side.
Why all this weeping and wailing over how hard the “real juno” would find it to go through witht he adoption? Flannagan is against abortion, she says, because its “traumatic” and also a kind of “rite of passage to womanhood” that has (mysteriously and without reference to health care) replaced ordinary gynecological exams. What are girls and women to do? What age is ok, in flannagan’s mind, for a woman to have sex, accidentally or dangerously get pregnant, and to choose to have an abortion, put the baby up for adoption, or go through with the birth and rearing the child? Flannagan doesn’t say, because she doesn’t caer to ever give women the agency to control their own sexuality.
I worry more about the women in Flannagan’s sons lives than I do about the sons. She is viciously anti female.
aimai
re: Humor & clumsiness vs. wit
It may just be that Noel Cowards are thin on the ground in Hollywood. But 3 Stooges? Every street corner.
Great post, Amanda! I only kind of know Flanagan, but I know this “feminism damages women” thing is her main meme.
“wtf, you ‘knew what that meant’? what did you THINK it meant?”
I had the same response, kidlacan.
And I blogged about this piece, though obviously not as eloquently as Amanda, here.
Never could understand why “natural” processes are supposed to hurt…even when not interfered with…those processes unique to women, anyway, when all the rest of the time we are told that pain means something is wrong! Look, if it’s gonna hurt, I ain’t a-going. Hasn’t anyone else ever questioned such a bizarre idea?
The idea that a cruel god and cruel nature have ganged up on a segment of humanity is nauseating. Let’s ditch the god and strike back at (that idea of?) nature–we’re the ones with the brains, after all.
I want to cry when I read about a teen running off and dying in the cold when she wasn’t the guilty one. I wonder how close I was to doing the same, back then.
Whenever I hear some woman categorically dissing men, I step in and expose the shoddiness of such generalizations…but now I wonder what dark story lurks behind such talk. Of my friends, more say they were molested when young than say they weren’t.
I have dial-up, I just re-Nortonized and now I can’t get Pandagon or Slashdot because they just lock it up. Ideas?
Because she’s not really interested in “living” it. She’s interested in lecturing younger women (particularly those with far fewer neuroses about their sexuality) to behave in a way that doesn’t upset dear Aunt Flanagan. She and her intellectual pals (Sessions, Shalit et al) aren’t interested in setting an example; they’re just making a living sucking up to the patriarchy as professional hand-wringers.
Speaking of “Juno”, look what I found on Ellen Page’s imdb profile:
“Considers herself to be a Feminist and tries to steer clear of the “stereotypical roles for teenage girls” because she finds them to be “sexist”.
Have I mentioned that I (heart) Ellen Page in the last hour or so?
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell my great-grandmother’s story, Amanda. She died when I was 19 and even though I grew up about 10 miles from her, the only time I remember seeing her was at her funeral.
Every story I’ve heard about her was unpleasant and I always wondered why that was. 20 plus years later, maybe I’ve finding some of the answers. Hers could not have been an easy life, and I wonder how her life and the stories could have been different.
Amanda, please please please fillet and hang out to dry this article about the Christo-sexist new take on abortion: it is bad for men! As in, encouraging men to say things like, I’ve had abortions - and shit. Oh, take your sharpest scalpel!
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/
la-na-menabort7jan07,0,5749127.story?page
=1&coll=la-home-nation
Coming from me, it would have meant, “If you insist on hovering over the toilet seat, at least wipe up after yourself, you disgusting slob, so I don’t have to clean up a stranger’s piss to use the toilet myself.”
That would take up half the wall, though.
Fantastic post, Amanda. Nailed it. I read that Flanagan article this morning and literally had to walk out of my house and walk down the driveway. My favorite moment: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated?
No, women’s liberation is predicated on our remaining chattel. Bodily integrity is NOT tantamount to personal sovereignty. She’s a genius!
I’m not going to pretend the NYT is the bastion of reasoned analysis, but honestly.
P.S. @kidlacan and Molly Ivors, I’d also like to know what tea leaves Flanagan read (like I don’t know) to glean so definitively the msg of that one word.
Roger, she’s already eviscerated it.
She lost me at “biology is destiny.” Is that why you refuse all medical care, do not drive a car, and live in trees Ms. FLanagan? Otherwise, you’re just a poser.
Thanks. I was hoping you’d give Flanagan the smackdown she so well deserves for that idiotic commentary about how good it was in the old days.
I recently got a subscription plea from The Atlantic. I will never subscribe to that rag - one of its editors is responsible for unleashing that ninny Flanagan on the world.
“ it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution.”
Hah.
(Although I suppose she might mean “one of many/virtually all”. I first read it as ‘the one appetite . . . “)
Mothworm, if “eviscerated” was supposed to be a link, it’s not working (in Firefox), although it is displayed in red. ??
This piece is now No. 2 on the most e-mailed list. Of course, sometimes I e-mail stuff that gets me riled, but I have an uneasy feeling lots of people thought she was right on.
Your analysis of Ms. Flanagan’s piece is spot-on (as are many comments above) but as the mother of two teens - one girl and one boy — I can’t join in the chorus of approval for the movie Juno. I find it hard to believe that a teen pregnancy is not much of a big deal, even with the perfect parents. The part about the abortion clinic being gross was also a lie. And what I heard in the movie was that Juno decided to go through with the pregnancy because the fetus had fingernails. Give me a break!
She lost me at “biology is destiny.” Is that why you refuse all medical care, do not drive a car, and live in trees Ms. FLanagan? Otherwise, you’re just a poser.
In point of fact, Nothip, Flanagan is a cancer survivor, and she used all the biological destiny-dying modern treatments available. Also, she has been married for a long time but only has two children. Methinks somebody has no problem defying biological destiny when it’s HER doing it. It’s just other uppity women who shouldn’t.
I love it when I read something new that indicates that I don’t exist.
Got pregnant at 21, gave child for adoption, rarely if ever think of her now. I could not give a child a life then, and since have gone on to finish college and travel the world and find love and satisfaction - and a childfree life.
O/T: The new Darwin Awards are out. On the pages for female “winners,” there’s the biological sign for “female.” I don’t see the biological sign for “male” on the other pages…
And the thing is that the site was put together by a woman — “Wendy.”
Got pregnant at 21, gave child for adoption, rarely if ever think of her now. I could not give a child a life then, and since have gone on to finish college and travel the world and find love and satisfaction - and a childfree life.
If you have given birth to a child you’re not childfree. You just didn’t raise it.
I found “Juno” to be a maddening film just because the message it was trying to get across was good but it was too washed in Hollywood happy ending. We already have enough problems with teens looking at unrealistic movies and TV and think since it turned out well for the characters it’ll turn out well for them (can you say “Gilmore Girls”? I knew that you could).
Anna, I find your comment interesting. In my life I’ve known three women who gave kids up for adoption, and all of them were profoundly negatively impacted by it. (Then again, two of them were not exactly stable to begin with.)
Likewise, all the women I’ve known who have had abortions are impacted by it. I think when it happens the veil of secrecy/shaming stuff around abortion is at least as damaging as the procedure itself. Later on, especially if the woman later has a family, it takes on a different layer of meaning. I’m totally on board that abortion is the least bad resolution to teenage pregnancy, but the fact remains — it is still traumatic.
Anyone else out there who has been pregnant who can comment on this?
Amanda I think you missed the devastating consequences from marriage itself. In many cases the whole “marriage protected women” is Victorian fairytale in and of itself.
Men could beat their wives and rape them with impunity. Men controlled all the purse strings, even her own money became his when they married, divorce was devastating, if she could even get it. . Men could kill their wife and given the right excuse (or no excuse at all) could get away with it.
When the idea of the “burning bed” became a big issue in the 70s, it terrified the patriarchy. The idea that women could would turn on their
abusers,oppressors, husbands had to be dealt a swift and decisive blow, they argued.The way liberals have moved the country away from excusing and allowing spousal abuse, and child abuse, I think disoriented them for awile. It could be argued though that they have stepped up their attacks in the psychological sphere, toward women and girls, to garner what they used to be able to control with physical fear alone. And the scars from psychological attacks are far more lasting.
” It takes some thinking through but she has hit the nail on the head–the problem for Flannagan et al is that the whole “babies are sacred” thing is just a cover for “women shouldn’t be allowed to have sex without suffering” and even (truth be told) women shouldn’t be allowed to exist without suffering.”
I think Flanagan’s deal is not ‘women shouldn’t be allowed’ anything. I read her as believing women are too weak/stupid/menstruatingl/whatever-the-fuck to handle freedom and need society to gently push them into the proper roles (with notable, ahem, exceptions). That’s obviously pretty much a dictionary definition of sexism, but she adds the wrinkle of her opinions of men not being any higher. (In Flanagania, we adult males are to be treated as nothing but 8-year-olds with hard-ons)
It comes off to me like on old school elitism, where they’re are rules and rights for the Flanagans of the world, but the rest of us need to follow her bullshit because we can’t be trusted to think and act for ourselves. She’d be happyist as an 18th century French aristocrat.
It could hurt because our ancestors chose to stand upright - - - but oops that’s evolution
Anna touches on a point I was going to make: I’ve heard it argued, and persuasively that the whole adoption-is-hellishly-traumatic angle is as heavily exaggerated as the idea abortion will leave you emotionally scarred for life.
She *does* employ servants and takes the credit for their work (nanny? housekeeper? what are you talking about, I’m a stay-at-home mother!). So she kind of is.
Jen:
“I’m totally on board that abortion is the least bad resolution to teenage pregnancy, but the fact remains — it is still traumatic.”
Not always the case. My teen abortion was traumatic for me, but that was because of the obstacles put in place to keep me from getting my abortion. The ordeal would have been 1000 times less traumatic if I hadn’t had to deal with the fear that the judge was NOT going to let me get my abortion. Also, traumatic was the after affects, when the one person I confided in what had been done, turned around and blabbed to the WHOLE SCHOOL. I categorically denied it to everyone, because while I didn’t feel ashamed of what I did, I knew most people were going to try to put the shame on me, which would have probably made me feel worse, ashamed, b/c I wasn’t properly ashamed about it.
The overwhelming feeling I had, from the moment the judge agreed to my temporary emancipation to now, is a great feeling of relief. Not all women will feel this way, true, and some of that feeling will come from the way they believe society expects them to feel about their abortions, but to categorize abortion as traumatic, is going too far, and buying into the pro-life meme, that women must be protected from the “traumatic” decision.
Anna touches on a point I was going to make: I’ve heard it argued, and persuasively that the whole adoption-is-hellishly-traumatic angle is as heavily exaggerated as the idea abortion will leave you emotionally scarred for life.
IIRC, it depends on how the adoption went down. If you were shamefully shuffled off to a home for “wayward girls” where you were constantly badgered to repent your sins, went into labor without knowing what the hell was happening to your body, and had the baby whisked away without a chance to even hold it, it was pretty traumatic and did leave a lot of women scarred for life.
Open adoption — where the mother gets to decide who will adopt the child and has some limited contact with them if she wants — seems to be less traumatic, to say the least.
Flanagan’s glorification of “the good old days” of the Victorian era also shows how cocooned in white (and upper-class) privilege she is.
There is a (great) book, Having Our Say by Sarah and Elizabeth Delany - African-American women who were born to a former slave father in the Jim Crow era, grew up to be professional women, and told their story when they were centenarians (Sarah lived to be 106, Elizabeth 102). Sarah Delany recalled how, as a teenage girl, she was severely punished for staying out past her curfew. Here’s why: “In those days, a colored [sic] girl could be raped, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.” The Delanys’ father was a minister, their mom a teacher - they were middle-class African-Americans, who still had to fear rape and the (presumably) white men who dould get away with it.
There were MANY more prostitutes in 19th Century New York than there are today; many poor women working in factories or as servants turned to casual prostitution to eek out their incomes. Stephanie Coontz, Christine Stansell, and other feminist historians have documented how badly poor women, and women of color, were treated in the “good old days.”
Every time someone idolizes the “good old days” of the Victorian era when men “treated women well” it makes my blood boil. Because it’s NOT TRUE, DAMMIT.
“I’m totally on board that abortion is the least bad resolution to teenage pregnancy, but the fact remains — it is still traumatic.”
Even ignoring the “abortion is always traumatic” meme, abortion is hardly the least bad resolution to teenage pregnancy if the pregnant teen in question wants to give birth.
Re the Darwin awards: they have started making a big deal about female winners precisely because they are incredibly rare. In fact in book 4, one chapter of 10 covers all the female winners, and about a third of them died in the company of a male winner as well, generally while having sex in an inappropriate and dangerous location.
Marking people who died by incredibly stupid means as female if they are isn’t anti-woman if the point it’s trying to make is that women who win the Darwin Awards are the rarest of the rare, thus implying that men are morons. It may be anti-man to let male Darwin Award winners be considered male by default rather than specifically pointing out that they’re men, but Wendy’s goal isn’t to say “Haha, look at the stupid women!” but “Wow, we actually got a woman dumb enough to kill herself by stupidity this time… how rare! Normally only men are this dumb.”
Personally I like to look at the Darwin Awards as the ultimate answer to every troll who whines about how men made the world and women are too dumb to run things and blah blah. “If women are so inferior to men, how come 90% of the Darwin Award winners are male?”
Jen — Am I “impacted” by my pregnancy and abortion? Sure. It was all quite unpleasant, especially the morning sickness, and it gave me a new level of understanding about myself. It has, in fact, made me a stronger person, and while I’m not glad that it happened, I’m glad that I could turn the experience to my advantage. Am I traumatized by it? Oh, hell, no. The whole thing was a pain, yes, and I was and still am sad that I, who wants children badly, had an opportunity to have one and had to choose not to do so. But that’s a far cry from it being a “traumatizing” experience, and every time you repeat the lie that abortion is always traumatizing, you reinforce the cultural forces which make it traumatic for some women. So please stop.
Trish — While I see what you’re saying about Gilmore Girls, in defense of one of my favorite shows, let me just point out that the character of Lorelei is completely horrified at the idea of other teen girls making the choice she did, and every time the subject comes up, she tries to discourage them.
Mortality during pregnancy and childbirth was very high in Victorian times, or so I’ve been told (50 times higher than today?). Certainly that is an objective fact that has to be factored into understanding Victorian attitudes towards sex. Certainly the question below comes into much greater force when pregnancy is a lottery with death.
We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?
The answer our ancestors should have arrived at:
Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? is “No”.
They arrived at “Yes”, and so no sexual liberation meant no enfranchisement.
If women are so inferior to men, how come 90% of the Darwin Award winners are male?” - Because women doing crazy things is generally not reported?
Personally I like to look at the Darwin Awards as the ultimate answer to every troll who whines about how men made the world and women are too dumb to run things and blah blah. “If women are so inferior to men, how come 90% of the Darwin Award winners are male?”
This is exactly the Lawrence Summers argument about women’s inherent lesser abilities in science. Men take risks, he would say, more so than women, or men are more represented in the extremes of IQ or ability or whatever distribution, and so more Darwin awards, but also more Nobel Prizes will go to men. The extreme lows and highs of ability are with men, and so that is why men run the world. etc. etc.
Romantic comedy movies where the heroine is supposed to be “fun” and “funny” almost always have her humour come out of clumsiness. I have yet to see her be funny out of wit.
See the Hindi movie actresses Kajol or Juhi Chawla in their romantic comedy hits - their humor comes from sharp wit.
I’m totally on board that abortion is the least bad resolution to teenage pregnancy, but the fact remains — it is still traumatic.
Anyone else out there who has been pregnant who can comment on this?
Um, no. Again I say…ABORTION WAS NOT TRAUMATIC. Find that hard to wrap your head around?
I had a kid at 17 - kept him, raised him, was the single best thing I’ve ever done. I have absolutely no regrets - except that I married his loser dad. I’m not against abortion, but this was in 1972 and abortion was only available in New York. It was the best decision for ME to carry pregnancy to term and raise my son. Sure - it wasn’t easy at the time - but I look back and laugh at how horrific I thought it was. You know, nobody ever talks about the benefits of teenage pregnancy. The right kind of kid will grow and mature from the experience. My son and grandkids are truly the light of my life.
Darwin Award “winners” are mostly men because they have more opportunities to be stoopid. Nobody interferes with 20-something males that are boobish. A female in the same situation is gently reminded of her need to not be foolish and even removed from the danger.
My brother indulged in extreme sports and the attitude was “BWBB”. My like-minded cousin (F) was chided, derided, and threatened with psychological testing if she continued.
“If women are so inferior to men, how come 90% of the Darwin Award winners are male?”
Chicks can’t do anything right.
I’m reminded of the theory which points out that your average English matron never sees one murder in her lifetime, let alone one a week, and deduces that Miss Marple is a very very clever serial killer with a talent for framing others…
It’s interesting that Flanagan complains about Juno’s pregnancy being too easy, because one of the things that struck me about the movie was how it refutes the common anti-choice argument that a girl should just carry the pregnancy to term and give the baby up for adoption, since it’s so easy!
“Juno” shows how, even in the absolutely ideal circumstances–the girl is reasonably well-adjusted, the parents are supportive, they find a wholesome upper-middle-class family to adopt the baby, there are no medical complications–pregnancy is difficult, and not just because you have to pee every two hours and everyone at school calls you “The Cautionary Whale.” Once Juno decides to bring the fetus to term, she feels responsible for it and worries about being able to provide it with good, supportive parents. When the couple she has lined up to adopt turns out to be less reliable than she thought, she’s devastated. It’s not necessarily a matter of just popping out a baby and cheerfully handing it over to whoever wants one. And, yeah, that’s even true in the “fairy tale” scenario where everything turns out all right.
Of course, Flanagan seems to be upset that things aren’t even more difficult and traumatic, that there are teen moms (not to mention teens who had abortions) who have the audacity to walk around not being scarred for life, but, well, that’s Caitlin Flanagan all over.