A powerful talk.

A law against spousal rape. A law against spousal murder. A paycheck of her own. And egalitarian marriage. Once women got political power, they insisted on being protected by the ordinary privileges of citizens of a modern democratic society rather than a husband fenced in by the medieval kind of marriage to which Douthat and Schulman would return. Uppity women changed marriage a lot. If they hadn’t, why would any gay or lesbian person want a share in it?

That’s the last paragraph of Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece, The Damsels Demur. In it, she applies the smack down to conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Sam Schulman and their limp defenses of heterosexual marriage.

“If a woman is merely perceived as having the intention to gain power … people are likely to make a wealth of inferences about her character, and judge her accordingly,“ write Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescoll of the Yale School of Management. “Specifically, the intention to gain power may signal to others that she is an aggressive and selfish woman who does not espouse prescribed feminine values of communality.“

That’s from ‘Power Hungry’ Females Less Likely to Get Votes on Miller McCune.

Resistance is what you begin to embody when the culture changes and you find that you stand for values that are no longer fashionable. … I don’t get up the morning and decide to resist. But I have an impulse towards critical speech and then the culture resists me. That is the counterintuitive truth about how resistance works: just as lightning appears to strike from the sky downwards but actually rises from the earth, resistance runs not only from the individual towards the culture but, more profoundly, from the culture against the individual.

Feminist artist, art critic, and teacher Mira Schor on resistance and art in her essay The White List. The essay overall discusses the effects of resisting — of being a contrarian voice, a radically critical voice — in a culture that sees itself as progressive, but is really establishment and only slightly left of center. Yes, I am using capital-‘p’ political terms here. I think they’re appropriate.

I had not heard of Schor before hearing about her lecture at The Contemporary, but I am intrigued by what she said and plan to learn more.

Check out images of some of her pieces in the Brooklyn Museum’s Feminist Art Base. Or you can see a few of them in person at The Contemporary’s current exhibit “Substitute Teacher, ” on view until May 16.

Schor is also the author of two books, Wet and A Decade of Negative Thinking.

But what we know is that reproductive justice isn’t just about freedom from coercive sterilization. It’s also about access to a full range of reproductive technologies, whether that’s birth control, sterilization, abortion or even childbirth.

From Worried About Women of Color? Thanks, But No Thanks, Anti-Choicers. We’ve Got It Covered. by the kick-ass Miriam Pérez on Racialicious.com.

The voices of women of color have been silent and/or silenced on the issues of abortion, birth control, and access. Pérez discusses reproductive justice in Latina-specific context in her essay. Similar struggles and policies have targeted Black American women. Now, however, this history of forced sterilizations and eugenics is being used by anti-abortion groups to undermine access to abortion for all women.

But what galls me? This shit right here:

One of the most contentious parts of the law was the creation of a Web site whereby any woman who had had an abortion would have been required to provide personal details pertaining to her choice, including her relationships, financial situation and motivation for seeking an abortion.

Because all women who seek abortions are careless sluts, right? They’re not, after all, women who are be in committed relationships with men who are having trouble finding steady, living-wage employment. Or women who may be in an abusive relationship. Or women whose health may be at risk. Or women whose contraception failed. Or women who miscalculated her menstrual cycle and now finds herself in a position where she can’t afford, and isn’t really sure she wants to have a child.

That’s the kind of shit that just causes women to, for example, drive 8 hours to a neighboring state to get an abortion. Like it or not, whether you want to admit it or not, when a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, there is very little she won’t do or try in order to terminate her pregnancy.

Don’t believe me? In Mexico, where abortion is illegal almost everywhere, an estimated 845,000 abortions (out of roughly 28 million women aged 15-49) still take place.

The question should not be “Should abortion be legal?” The questions should be “Do we believe that women should be required to risk death or injury if they do not wish to carry a pregnancy to term?” and “Do we believe that women who conceive should be forced to risk their health and safety to give birth?”

I will end with this point from a 2009 Guttmacher Institute study:

Of the approximately 42 million abortions that do occur worldwide, almost half are performed by unskilled individuals, in environments that do not meet minimum medical standards or both. Virtually all of these unsafe abortions take place in the developing world, where the unmet need for contraception remains high and very restrictive abortion laws often are the norm.

In the developed and developing world alike, antiabortion advocates and policymakers refuse to acknowledge the facts that abortion’s legal status has much less to do with how often it occurs than with whether or not it is safe, and that the surest way to actually reduce the incidence of abortion is to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy. While they debate, obfuscate and insist on legal prohibitions, the consequences for women, their families and society as a whole continue to be severe and undeniable.

• Related: An Overview Of Abortion In The United States

“Good sex”, for most of these men, starts with a striptease, moves on to oral, then to vaginal and concludes with anal or oral, together with a face shot or with swallowed ejaculate (the woman, it goes without saying, is the “catcher” for all this activity). There are no descriptions of feelings of pleasure in these men’s reports, of tastes, smells, textures – of, in short, the vast majority of sensual experience which make up the warp and weft of sexual pleasure.

From Pornography and Objectification by Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette on what may be my new favorite blog, O Mangue.

Turning pain into power, restoring dignity, and giving girls and women skills so they can earn their own living and no longer have to work — willfully or by force — the sex trade.

Source

The one thing I’ll be damned if I let stand in my spheres of influence, though, is the erasure, violence, and willful intolerance, that comes from being close-minded and ignorant about the interconnectedness of the basics of the human condition.

From Brandon‘s post It’s A Fight for Our Lives.

While I feel a strong personal connection to this day I also know the stories are not my own. I can mourn but also recognize important power differentials that make other trans folks more likely targets of violence. We must avoid using the stories of those killed to advance consciousness raising projects and a political agenda that is about the needs of trans folks with more relative power and privilege. Instead, we need to be continually working to build a politics that centers the voices and needs of those who are most vulnerable, even within already marginalized populations.

A moving essay about gender, identity, class, race and media.