Enough is enough
I've been thinking about this for awhile.
But it was this blithe post by young Yglesias that really made me decide to come out and say it. [ft. 1]
I am a woman, I am single, and I have had recourse to the "morning after" pill. I have been in committed relationships, I have slept around, and I have been engaged. I use condoms with an o'erweening sense of virtue and I think that the pill might have been the most important invention of the 20th century. I decided at about 16, when still a virgin who planned to stay so until marriage, that I would probably abort a fetus (early) if I felt I could not do right by the child. The adopted kids from the neighborhood, frankly, did not present a positive ideal of the alternatives. I might start having qualms later into a pregnancy, but I would never presume to judge the circumstances of another woman's procrastination.
Generally, I feel that Professor B and her colleagues are representing my arguments well enough, but, [insuffficient expletives deleted] it was the insouciance of Matt's post that really hit me. Abortion rights are personal to some people, after all. It's not just political calculus to some of us.
Oh, and to the alias? It was born out of fora where I noticed subtle and not-so subtle bias against women. I didn't want to be part of gender bias (the Wollstonecraftian illusion) and figured I could argue my way out of religious bias in a way that might be useful. I am also a frothing Mieville fan, and so the chance to echo the revolutionary pass-name "Jack" seemed poignant to me. In Mieville as in historical sources of the late 1700s, both men and women used the name "Jacques" to convey their revolutionary sentiments. When I starting posting under the handle, I didn't think I'd get so sucked in, but once I was, I was more interested in making general rather than identitarian points.
These days, though, and increasingly, I sense that powers are massing against women. My mostly conservative parents support Roe v. Woe, my grandmother's having been a nurse who treated many a patient who'd suffered botched back-alley abortions; they'd always told me that Roe v. Wade would never been overturned, that we'd never go back to that. I look around me and I think, "For so many girls, it might as well be." Some major battles are to come; Bush is still trying to push through his nominees for judgeships, and, quite frankly, I worry about women in their early twenties who believe they're merely exercising their sexuality.
Anyway, it's an appropriate time for me to step out, onto the internet, as a woman and a feminist.
[ft. 1. (update) It's not so much the message of Matt's post (which is more about Chafee) as the facility of his waving away of NARAL, and, implicitly, that organization's concerns, that really tipped me over. I don't really blame Matt: he's a man, a wonk, and a prolific and often careless writer, not necessarily in that order. The rest of this post has been cleaned up since its first appearance, as the first version was very much published in the heat of the moment.]
But it was this blithe post by young Yglesias that really made me decide to come out and say it. [ft. 1]
I am a woman, I am single, and I have had recourse to the "morning after" pill. I have been in committed relationships, I have slept around, and I have been engaged. I use condoms with an o'erweening sense of virtue and I think that the pill might have been the most important invention of the 20th century. I decided at about 16, when still a virgin who planned to stay so until marriage, that I would probably abort a fetus (early) if I felt I could not do right by the child. The adopted kids from the neighborhood, frankly, did not present a positive ideal of the alternatives. I might start having qualms later into a pregnancy, but I would never presume to judge the circumstances of another woman's procrastination.
Generally, I feel that Professor B and her colleagues are representing my arguments well enough, but, [insuffficient expletives deleted] it was the insouciance of Matt's post that really hit me. Abortion rights are personal to some people, after all. It's not just political calculus to some of us.
Oh, and to the alias? It was born out of fora where I noticed subtle and not-so subtle bias against women. I didn't want to be part of gender bias (the Wollstonecraftian illusion) and figured I could argue my way out of religious bias in a way that might be useful. I am also a frothing Mieville fan, and so the chance to echo the revolutionary pass-name "Jack" seemed poignant to me. In Mieville as in historical sources of the late 1700s, both men and women used the name "Jacques" to convey their revolutionary sentiments. When I starting posting under the handle, I didn't think I'd get so sucked in, but once I was, I was more interested in making general rather than identitarian points.
These days, though, and increasingly, I sense that powers are massing against women. My mostly conservative parents support Roe v. Woe, my grandmother's having been a nurse who treated many a patient who'd suffered botched back-alley abortions; they'd always told me that Roe v. Wade would never been overturned, that we'd never go back to that. I look around me and I think, "For so many girls, it might as well be." Some major battles are to come; Bush is still trying to push through his nominees for judgeships, and, quite frankly, I worry about women in their early twenties who believe they're merely exercising their sexuality.
Anyway, it's an appropriate time for me to step out, onto the internet, as a woman and a feminist.
[ft. 1. (update) It's not so much the message of Matt's post (which is more about Chafee) as the facility of his waving away of NARAL, and, implicitly, that organization's concerns, that really tipped me over. I don't really blame Matt: he's a man, a wonk, and a prolific and often careless writer, not necessarily in that order. The rest of this post has been cleaned up since its first appearance, as the first version was very much published in the heat of the moment.]
Marilee Scott 1:31 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks for the welcome, hilzoy. I do find it strange, though, that this should be the first post to have attracted sex pr0n comment spam to this site.
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