Jill righteously calls him out for it (as did many others):

The deflecting from legitimate concerns, and the fact that the OWS “public” includes a lot of men who think it’s ok to treat women at a protest like we’re there for their visual fulfillment, troubles me. No one is saying, “Don’t find women attractive.” . . . No one is objecting to the fact that straight men are attracted to some women (fun fact: straight women are also attracted to some men! So really, no one is pissed about attraction, I promise). What people are pissed about is what Rebecca Traister says:

“The larger, simpler argument, outside of consent or permission, is: This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.” . . .

Emphasis mine. . . . [C]reating a blog and a video dedicated to showing women at a protest with the sole purpose of reminding dudes that women at the protest are hot? That does reduce women to objects of male attention. It’s another reminder, for women, that how seriously we’re taken and how valuable we are depends on how sexually attractive we’re deemed.

Read the whole thing; she’s got good things to say. But the part that really triggered something for me was this:

Frankly, the kinds of dudes who would come to the OWS protests because they heard there are hot chicks there? Are not the kinds of dudes I want to be protesting with. I would hope they’re not the kinds of dudes that most progressives would want to be protesting with — but judging by the lefty-dude reaction to Steven Greenstreet (hi Matt Zoller Seitz, looking at you!), that’s not the case. It’s disappointing.

To say the least. And far too common, from way back. It’s no secret that supposedly “progressive” groups have always been rife with sexism and sexual pressuring, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Progressives have never been immune to human failings, including stereotyping and bigotry of the kind that they supposedly abhor but sometimes don’t recognize in themselves; the long fight for acceptance in progressive movements of gays and transexuals is one case in point, and the difficulty many white (and especially male heterosexual) liberals have in recognizing and acknowledging their own privilege is another. But the LGBTQ community, people of color, and other marginalized groups, though still embattled, have by now to a considerable degree been granted by progressives the one thing many persist in denying to women: recognition of the fact that they have real interests, problems, and worth that must be taken seriously. The situation is far from perfect, and not everybody agrees on how the tensions between different progressive constituencies should be resolved, but in most cases they are acknowledged, and the human pain and human interests that lie at their heart are given due deference. Except in the case of women.

To be sure, progressives are not right-wingers. They don’t overtly hate women. They don’t gleefully consign them to death by deliberate neglect at the hands of sniffy sex-negative religious bigots. They don’t dishonestly and cynically strain moral concepts – often ones introduced and championed by progressives – such as “informed consent” to create barriers to the very autonomy they are intended to protect. They don’t penalize the fact of women’s having sexual natures – just the opposite! But in too many cases they don’t grant them the respect and freedom needed to act on their own natures and seek their own good. Just as with conservatives, women exist for far too many progressive men for the purpose of their gratification – an impersonal usage that erases those women as persons themselves.

Which leads me, finally, to the question that came up for me on surveying this latest stupid and distasteful incident: how, exactly, are these dipshit “progressive” men progressives? What goes through their heads, what process takes place in their heads, such that they wind up thinking things like “let’s go to the OWS protest and photograph women’s breasts!”? How, when they are called out for that, do they expend so much energy defending their childishness and sexism? Why do they not care about offending or humiliating their supposed fellow activists – about derailing or undermining the movement they claim to support – about embarrassing that movement by acting in a regressive manner and then elevating their own bad behavior into the limelight? More particularly, what is it that allows progressives to empathize with everyone but women, even women in their own movement? What allows them to hear everyone else’s protests at mistreatment, and dismiss those of women out of hand?

In a way, I suppose it has something in common with the denial and self-absorption that allowed Southern slave-holders to rationalize their own crimes. Patriarchy is its own form of slavery, more complex and less overt, but very real, and it is very hard to acknowledge you are doing wrong when your entire lifestyle, all its comforts and conveniences and pleasures, derives so much from others’ service to your needs. It is easy to protest obvious wrongs that don’t require you to change your own life to amend. But progressive men, in many cases, are no better than the privileged classes of the Confederacy, of apartheid South Africa, of Wall Street itself, at admitting that their own satisfaction depends on bending others to their desires, against their will and at the denial of their basic human personhood.

You can’t be progressive just for causes you aren’t invested in, at the expense of people you don’t like. Being progressive means wanting to live in a better world – not just wanting to take down the most guilty in this one and then carry on regardless. Being progressive means checking your privilege, living the dream you envision, being part of the solution – all slogans that have at their heart the basic truth that you have to be as critical of yourself as you are of others, or more so, since you can only really change yourself.

You aren’t a progressive if you mistreat women. You aren’t a progressive if you think progressivism is defined as rallies, protests, and events, rather than a mindset that is grounded on a world in which people are treated with respect, by everyone, starting with yourself. You aren’t a progressive if you go to events but don’t treat the people there with regard. You aren’t a progressive if you revel in your own privileges at the expense of the pain and diminishment of others, then feel hurt because you’ve decided that whatever superficial support you feel for “the cause” entitles you to use others for your pleasure and then resent it when they object.

If you’re not a progressive for any of these reasons, you’re little better than a reactionary even if you vote the right way. You’re pro-choice? Great. You don’t think being pro-choice encompasses the choice to control, and present, your own sexuality on your own terms? You’re not a progressive, and you’re a pain and an embarrassment to those who sincerely try to be.

He’s been in the news lately for making bizarre comparisons of gay marriage to beer, a cup of tea, and a paper napkin – all predicated upon the rather obvious but undeniable point that “it is what it is. Right? You can call it whatever you want, but it doesn’t change the character of what it is”. This is a claim on which Santorum congratulates himself by describing it as “sort of metaphysical”, but might otherwise be categorized as “sort of idiotic”. Apparently it means something to him, though, because he keeps saying it – most recently in a just-posted interview on the Iowa Independent Website: “It’s like going out and saying, ‘That tree is a car.’ Well, the tree’s not a car. A tree’s a tree. Marriage is marriage.” He goes on to spew a frothy mixture of crazy in a wide arc: gay marriage “minimizes what that bond means to society” (by letting people . . . form that bond . . .); “you’re gonna undermine religious liberty in this country” (his examples consist exclusively of the liberty to prevent other people from doing things); “we’ve created something that is not what it is” (so much for the tautological metaphysics).

But there’s a particular moment in the interview I want to highlight, because it captures so perfectly the ideological dishonesty, and complete divorce from reality, of the right-wing, and particularly the anti-choice movement.

If your position on abortion prevails and abortion is prohibited, Senator, what should the penalty be for a woman who obtains an abortion or a doctor who performs one?

Santorum: I don’t think there should be criminal penalties for a woman who obtains an abortion. I see women in this case as a victim. I see the person who is performing the abortion as doing the illegal act

This is a common, but relatively recent, dodge for anti-choicers. Throughout history, in the US and many other countries, when abortion was illegal (and it was not always or universally, or even commonly, so), women who sought abortion were held guilty of a crime; a woman who successfully obtained an abortion was often jailed, and women who were injured in illegal abortions were arrested when they sought medical treatment. This was a major contributor to the death rate from illegal abortion: not only could women not find safe providers, but they were fearful of seeking treatment when their unsafe abortions went wrong. This was never, for the anti-choicers, a reason not to make abortion illegal. But it was viciously cruel, and that cruelty became part of the justification for legalizing abortion. The deadly legacy of the lack of choice has likewise been part of the motivation to keep abortion safe and women out of jail, against the misogynistic war to reverse both those developments.

Yet, there is a logic (if not a “metaphysics”) to the war on women who procure abortion: if abortion really is the horrible crime the right wing claims, it’s hard to grant impunity to people who plan, solicit, and participate in that crime. If abortion is murder, surely the one who knowingly seeks, requests, pays for, and submits to an abortion, deliberately, by choice and preference, knowing its meaning and consequences, must be a murderer, at least as much so as the medical professionals who perform the procedure (and surely more so in the case of medical abortion, in which the professional’s only role is to write or fill a prescription, but the woman’s intentional agency is just as extensive as in a surgical procedure). And the idea that someone who solicits, hires out, and participates in a serious crime – let alone “murder” – is not guilty would be a travesty of the law in the case of any real crime.

The willingness to absolve women of initiating, paying for, and participating in a crime for which the person they paid, who acted on that woman’s own body at her request, will be punished under law reflects no sensible understanding of criminal guilt. It is a purely political move intended to head off a backlash against the anti-choice movement for victimizing women legally as well as medically. It is an attempt to evade the public’s revulsion at the right wing’s treating uppity women as the criminals the wingers say that they are – and to prevent the spectacle of women languishing in jail for simply claiming their own fertility through an act that one out of three women in the US has undertaken in her lifetime. It is a deliberate decision to void their own moral judgments for political expediency – to let a category of so-called “crimes” go unprosecuted to avoid drawing scrutiny to the ways the criminalization of healthcare affects women in general, and thus maintain that oppression in broader effect. It is an all-but-explicit declaration that the ideology that they claim justifies their persecution of women is itself expendable if it would get in the way of persecuting women – that making women suffer is more important than consistently and honestly applying the ideological framework that they use to rationalize that suffering.

But beyond the craven dishonesty and political expedience of the misogynist anti-choice crowd, there is a deep contempt for reality itself. To rationalize their insistence that abortion is a crime, and simultaneous refusal to hold women accountable for their choice to commit that “crime”, they have to characterize the act as criminal but the deliberate commission of it not. Who commits criminal acts but is not a criminal? People who are mentally incompetent, or coerced. Thus: “I see women in this case as a victim”.

This is another popular trope of the misogynist right: women are incapable of agency in their own disapproved choices. The idea that women are commonly “pressured” into abortion is a staple of anti-choice activism, as is the idea that they don’t really know what they are doing. This, of course, makes no sense legally: whether or not you are “pressured”, you can’t plan, schedule, show up for, pay for, and participate in a crime – after extensive discussion, preparation, and informed consent! – and claim you were acting under duress. (It didn’t work for Patty Hearst, and she was truly coerced.) Nor can you claim, after all that, that you didn’t know what you were doing, nor – the legally important part – does that claim matter as a defense to a criminal charge. (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”) For women to be exculpable of crime for a crime they planned and participated in, they have to be not just unknowing, or a “victim”, but actually mentally incompetent – a mental child, lacking legal autonomy, unable to give consent for her own choices.

That is the characterization the right wing puts on women – any woman having, or even seeking, an abortion – as their out for criminalizing the act but not the actor. That is how Rick Santorum – and all his Wingnut Woman Hater’s Club fellows – describe every woman who makes a choice they disapprove of: incompetent, non-autonomous, “victimized” by choices they themselves have freely considered, endorsed, and enacted.

But these are not simply more of the crazy opinions and perverse perspectives on women and the world that the right wing wallows in. They are claims of fact – claims about what it is actually like to be a woman who wants an abortion, or simply be a woman who believes abortion is one of the tools she can use to control her own life, take care of her own body, and achieve her own goals. To be a “victim” of one’s own choices and goals, it must be true in fact that you are mentally deficient, not capable of decision-making about yourself as the owner and inhabitant of your own life and body, oppressed by circumstances to the point that you cannot, in literal fact, think straight about yourself. These are claims of psychological fact – claims about the actual mental states of women attempting to assert sexual autonomy – claims about all such women (since the get-out-of-abortion-free card is made available to all women on these grounds).

It is simply impossible that such a claim could be true. It is patently obvious that it is not, in fact, true even about most or very many of the women who choose abortion. (All such women undergo intake counseling and an informed consent discussion. Repeated studies have shown again and again that they are at least as mentally healthy after the fact as are women who have not had an abortion.) The actual facts are clear: women who choose abortion are not mentally deficient, mis-informed, or incapable of making their own decisions. The claim Santorum and his ilk rely on to absolve themselves of the consequences in public opinion of their own misogyny is simply not true. But since it was never intended to be true – only to sound like something that would help them if it were true – that has no effect on their willingness to keep saying it.

What this cashes out as, for me, is the absolute necessity to put women and women’s needs at the center of any discussion about abortion. A third of all women in this country will have an abortion in their lifetime – and that’s with the grinding barriers and hurdles the right wing has put in their way. Tens of millions of them have already had abortions – women from every part of the country, every ethnic and religious group, almost certainly every extended family. In the same way that the “I had an abortion” T-shirt makes that army of normal, everyday, free and independent women visible, and forces the misogynists to question how far they are willing to go in targeting their own friends and family members, we need to make it clear also that those women are not “victims”, nor criminals.

Unless you are willing to call some vast percentage of women in the country – family members, co-workers, the women who raised all those children, taught all those classes, earned all those college degrees, held down all those jobs, accomplished all that they have accomplished and are still doing, and in the course of it knowingly and deliberately and self-affirmingly chose to abort an unwanted pregnancy and were better off for it – mentally ill, mentally incompetent, not in control of their own lives or choices, unable to control their own lives and choices, then you cannot claim their are victims for having made those deliberate and conscious choices. You will have to confront the reality that the women who choose abortion are, in largest part, strong, self-aware, competent, autonomous, and fully responsible for their own lives, values, goals, choices, and actions. And that being anti-choice is an assault on those women and their status as independent and autonomous persons.

Why oh why is our country in the grips of a sex panic? I just don’t get it.

My response was:

Obama backlash was greenlight for all wingnuts; every hate/fear is now OK, unhidden, synergistic.

I’d like to de-Twitterize and unpack that a bit.

The Tidal Wave

The savagery of the current GOP sex-panic is numbing. Literally hundreds of anti-choice bills have been introduced in Congress and the state legislatures since the 2010 election, and their extremism exceeds previous bounds almost day by day. There are not just the usual things like bogus restrictions on healthcare clinics, intrusive requirements for unnecessary ultrasounds and false “counseling” (in some states, through mandatory visits to religious-right “crisis pregnancy centers”), waiting periods and other barriers; in several states there have been bills banning abortion in every case, including when the patient is actually dying, and bills authorizing religious-nut providers to literally let their patients die by withholding services and refusing to transfer them to a real caregiver. This, of course, on top of the raving, libelous assault on Planned Parenthood as a proxy for Title X services across the board, the shamelessly mendacious and sensationalized fictions of Breitbart and his media minions, and the really nasty crap about black women committing racial genocide by having abortions, or how forced childbirth is a feminist cause because fetuses are (seriously) “little, tiny women”.

The viciousness of it is just sickening, but not surprising. The utterly murderous hostility to women that drives the anti-choice/anti-contraception/anti-sex education/anti-sex crowd has never been difficult to see. The bald lies and persistent distortions that make up anti-choice rhetoric are a chronic illness of the right wing. Nothing that is coming out in these recent bills, or the rest of the hucksterizing and demonizing that has welled up into greater media prominence in recent months, is in any way new. What is new is that the insanity has been openly endorsed and propagated through legislation by the relatively mainstream elements of the GOP political class. Used to be you had to troll the real backwaters of the Southern state legislatures to find people as crazy as the ones who are now driving the Republican party. But now the most extreme – even, literally, fatal – excesses of misogyny have become mainstream legislative agendas at the highest levels of the GOP.

The Reason

The question, then, is not why there is a sex panic on the right wing, but why it has now become operationalized as a legislative agenda that the GOP leadership is willing to put front and center – even to bet its electability on. (The last time they threatened to shut down the government it ruined them for the next election cycle, but it was at least a consequence of the policies they had committed themselves to in the previous election cycle. This time it was over a berserker plan from their own margins to defund gynecological care by way of attacking Planned Parenthood. The GOP is just as fond of over-reaching as before, but the substance has gotten weirder.) What makes the backlash such a compelling tactic right now, when it has – as a die-hard legislative agenda – been largely back-burner for most of a generation?

The answer, I think, is that the sex panic and war on women have not suddenly grown in salience all by themselves. Instead, the political conditions have shifted such that the anti-woman wing, though no larger, now has a power and prominence it hadn’t had before. There are several contributing factors.

Contributing Factors and Dynamics

Obama

The most significant is the absolutely crazed reaction on the right to the election of Barack Obama. “Reenfranchising little tiny women fetuses” is hardly the only nonsense coming out of the right: birtherism and its many paranoid variants, the dark mutterings about madrassas and Kenya and “Hussein”, the re-emergence of red-baiting and absurd charges of communism and Nazism (often simultaneously), and many of the familiar lunacies of ’50s-era reactionism have all been created or in many cases simply dusted off in response to the claims of a confident, unapologetically (semi-)progressive black man to political legitimacy and the power of the Presidency. The effect has been to embolden many of the more-distant arms of the right wing, whom the “respectable” Republicans had been pandering to but not inviting into the halls of power. Obama’s election prompted waves of rumors about “gun-grabbing” and sudden shortages of ammunition as the result of gun nuts stockpiling in anticipation of their cold-dead-hands fantasy scenarios finally coming to life; militias and survivalists then became more welcome in mainstream right-wing circles as the less-extreme gun enthusiasts suddenly found themselves sharing the same apocalyptic delusions. The anti-Muslim bigots of course had a field day with the election of a non-white President with a Muslim middle name, son of a Muslim, who had attended Muslim schools in a Muslim country and was all like Muslimy and stuff (and right in the middle of our War on Muslim Terror!); open religious bigotry thus became not merely respectable but actual policy, and the religious extremists who fought their imaginary battles against “sharia law” brought their other religious obsessions with them into the GOP mainstream. In addition, the tone of the Obama-vs.-the-Heartland election also created its own forms of backlash: the rejection of Sarah Palin became, oddly, a kind of civil rights issue for stupid people, such that actually expecting someone to know something about their own supposed field of expertise, and to speak the truth about it, was pegged as discrimination on the part of “elitists” gripped by an evil obsession with knowledge, competence, and honesty. Thus, the election of Obama brought the marginals, the back-woodsers, and the drunk uncles of the GOP back into the Big Tent, dragging their issues, obsessions, and hostilities with them, and making the general climate on the right, and within the GOP, more hospitable to factions that had been an embarrassment just recently.

Immediately thereafter, the fears of the Obama-haters were ratified by the passage of the Affordable Care Act. No matter how weakened and compromised, the coming of communistic, anti-business, godless liberal socialized subsidies for private-market health insurance was both a death-blow to America as we know it and proof positive of everything that had ever been said about Obama. It was also a galvanizing event for virtually every strain of conservative, and a coordinating issue for the entire conservative bloc in Congress, as well as many activist groups among the general public. The immediate determination to cripple or repeal Obamacare was a practical issue every conservative could get behind, and generated a focus of legislative effort aimed at healthcare issues that every conservative in office (at both federal and state levels) could contribute to.

Teabaggers

A similarly welcoming air emerged within the Tea Party. With its badly-veiled racism and populist resentment of the “elites”, it created an environment in which extremist positions were no longer seen as a liability. By stoking disaffection pure and simple, teabaggers were able to swell their ranks with angry rightists from across the spectrum: gun-toters waving AR-15s at Obama to prove their point about responsible self-defense; teat-suckers from the oil, corn, and beef industries ranting about socialism; religious segregationists raving about the worldwide Muslim conspiracy; economic doomsdayers raving about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy; racial segregationists pining for their own Berlin wall in Arizona; goldbuggers, Galt Gulchers, godbags and every other thing. Keeping that coalition together, and at maximum size, meant not imposing any membership test. Since anything goes, everything went. Careful non-questioning of the ideological underpinnings of the movement, or any of the many fears and fantasies its members indulged in, allowed mainstream politicians to actively cultivate support from teabaggers who might at best have been thrown some rhetorical raw meat in previous years, but never indulged with a risky photo-op featuring visibly crazy right-wing counterculturists. This week’s Republican Presidential campaign debate was officially sponsored by – I shit you not – the John Birch Society, an organization that once set a record of sorts by having been declared too crazy for mainstream conservatism by no less than William F. Buckley, now not only on the bandwagon but helping to drive.

The teabag tidal wave was especially significant given the success of their declared adherents in the election of 2010. Not all teabag candidates won, but a surprising number did, and others polled far higher than the fast-dying “rational actor” school of political analysis would have suggested. Most importantly, several candidates spurned by the mainstream ran as independents, and some actually won. This prompted a recalibration of the right-wing Pandermeter: the lunatic fringe could no longer be counted on to vote Republican on autopilot – they were organized (loosely) now and could command serious tribute both at the polls and by way of their affiliated elective legislative bloc. Though not all the Congressional GOP first-termers of 2010 were explicitly teabaggers, many were far-gone ideological conservatives with little taste for compromise or the procedural niceties observed by more experienced legislators.

The Gathering of the Wingnuts

Thus, the right wing as a whole was both energized and consolidated by the election of Obama and the political events – legislative and electoral – that flowed from it. After the right-wing wagons had been circled, the traditional distinction between “fiscal conservatives” and “social conservatives” seemed to be moot. (Despite some confusion over where the “small government” teabaggers and libertarians stood, it became obvious that the conservatives howling about the federal deficit were (a) ignorant of economics, and especially of the contribution the Affordable Care Act would make to actually reducing healthcare expenditures, and (b) as devoted to social reactionism as any old-line conservative, and often more so. Hardline libertarians Ron and Rand Paul, supposedly devotees of personal freedom and self-determination, were among the most rabid sex-panickers in Congress, sponsoring, among many other things, bills for zygote personhood, absolute prohibitions on abortion in all cases, and to strip the Supreme Court of authority even to review the constitutionality of laws regarding personhood, abortion, or gay marriage.)

When the GOP gained a majority in the House of Representatives, their odd partnership of old-liners, teabaggers, libertarians, religious wingnuts, and others realized they could dominate the chamber, but only if they all worked together. And they did. The flood of radical, and often simply crazy, bills that emerged – anti-choice, anti-union, pro-gold-standard, anti-sharia, etc., etc. – was the result of an orgy of back-scratching, in which GOP Congressmembers all dutifully voted for each other’s bills regardless of substance or sanity. Something similar happened at the state level, where GOP governors appeared to be in a contest to solidify their credentials for reelection or a later Presidential race by introducing the most radical bills they could conjure up, on the most galvanizing issues they could identify.

One final factor, I think, is the general increase in partisanship that has been growing since at least the Clinton years, and to a considerable extent the Nixon years. The GOP in particular is incensed at the very existence of any Democratic President, and determined to de-legitimize both the Democrats and even the political process itself. Both parties have become more hostile to the other as well, and since the election of Obama the GOP seems to have made the determination that it simply will not do anything whatsoever with the Democrats, no matter how destructive the consequences. (The Democrats, of course, continue to surrender at every opportunity – making the destruction of Democratic policies the only truly bipartisan effort in Washington.) This has the effect of pushing GOP legislative efforts further to the right, almost without limitation. Since they’ve given up on working with the Democrats at all, there is no reason for them to move at all centerward, and every reason to move toward the far right where their center of mass is increasingly drifting.

The True Believer: The Nature of Mass Movements

Given all these factors and dynamic pressures, the otherwise unbelievable storm of misogyny and hostility to ordinary healthcare that has erupted in the last few years, and especially since the last election, seems almost inevitable. It is important to recognize that, as bad as it is, this reactionary legislative blitzkrieg is not focused solely on women; the GOP is equal-opportunity crazy, and is moving backwards across the board: protection for BP after the oil spill; protection for banks who’ve committed mortgage fraud; continued subsidies for oil, coal, and agribusiness; global-warming denialism; the gold standard; opposition to unemployment benefits and economic stimulus; the war on union labor; the war on teachers and public education; the war on immigrants . . . . They hate women – viciously, and fearfully – and they hate sex and they hate sexual freedom. But they hate unions, workers, Hispanics, and just about everybody else who’s not one of them, also. And those hatreds are not new.

What has happened is that the most-rabid hate faction has grown somewhat, and it has been bolstered by a cooperative alliance with other radical factions on the right. The “Rockefeller Republican” is essentially dead, and the GOP has tied itself to a passle of far-right activist groups that acknowledge no limits on how far they should go. Given the general outpouring of right-wing fanatacism that began with the Clinton election, was inflamed by Bush and 9/11, and reached the fever stage with Obama, there is no brake – practical, electoral, or moral – that what passes for a reasonable Republican can apply anymore. The GOP deliberately stoked fanaticism and hatred by making gay marriage an electoral issue in 2000 and 2004, putting the religious-right’s pet issues at the forefront as they never had been before; the intense fight over stem cell research under Bush had the same effect. But now, with the rise of the teabaggers and Obamaphobia rampant, the GOP is having trouble riding its own tiger. The wingers have control now, and, with no limiting factor in place, they’re letting it all hang out.

So what we’re seeing on the women’s-issues front, just as with what we see on the labor, employment, education, race, and environmental fronts, is what happens when the radical fringes coalesce and feel their combined strength. None of what they are doing is new; what is new is that they can now get it past the sanity-check previously imposed by older hands with more political experience. This is the face of conservatism that conservatism previously kept hidden. It’s always been there. Now they’ve merely discarded the mask of normalcy.

It’s from the Sierra Club’s new ad campaign “to remind our representatives who they are actually hurting when they attack the EPA.” I’m entirely in agreement with the goal of the campaign, and even with the message of this ad (“gutting emissions regulations results in greater release of toxins, which can do their worst damage during fetal development”). But I have reservations about its methods.

The obvious function of the ad, of course, is that it plays to the right-wing’s proclaimed concern for fetuses to the exclusion of all other health issues (including, of course, pre-natal care, gynecology, infant and child care, and other such irrelevancies). And the fact that the imagery plays so obviously and shamelessly off of the right wing’s fetish for pregnant bellies – in this case to prod them to do something to improve people’s health, rather than take away their rights to healthcare, is an amusing irony. But it’s just those points that leave me uncomfortable.

First, there’s something in a way defeatist, or at least pessimistic, about the focus of the campaign: because the GOP only cares about unborn fetuses, we have to couch every issue in terms of its impact on fetuses. (“Wear your seatbelt – so your fetus doesn’t get hurt!” “Support solar power – so your fetus will use less oil!” “Don’t spread deadly poisons in the environment – because it might hurt some of the fetuses of the less than 1% of the population that’s pregnant at any given time!”) But surrendering every issue to the religious right’s fetus-fetish takes everyone else in the population out of the picture. Mercury, dioxin, and other poisons in the environment hurt everyone. It matters that young children who have grown out of the right’s preferred age for adulation (i.e., they’ve been born already) are also vulnerable to developmental delays and all the other effects of environmental toxins; it matters that adults are crippled and killed by heavy metal poisoning; it matters that the women who are carrying these favored fetuses are also affected by the poisons they ingest – in addition to the fetuses that are the focus of concern in this campaign: these are the people who are hurt when the right wing attackes the EPA – why can’t the Sierra Club, of all people, say so? It may be true that the right only cares about fetuses (and then largely as tools for hurting women, who are their real obsession), but allowing them to forget everyone else is to forfeit the major part of the fight to them without contest. When progressives’ campaigns have the same focus, same tactics, and same blind spots as the reactionaries they are campaigning against, much is lost even if those campaigns succeed.

The second, and perhaps more striking, issue that arises for me from this ad is the imagery that is used. When I said it leaves everyone but the fetus out of the picture, I meant it literally. This ad replays in every detail one of the most common, and most offensive, tropes of anti-choice misogyny: the faceless pregnant woman reduced to nothing but her belly. (Can’t say “uterus“, you know!) You see it everywhere (and, as @ClinicEscort points out, particularly in stories about abortion): a woman’s body reduced to nothing but swollen boobs and swollen belly, or often just the belly – the face is always cut off, just out of the frame. The effect – and unquestionably the purpose – is to erase the woman from her own pregnancy. It’s fetus porn, with the woman dehumanized just as badly as, and in some ways even more fully than, in sexual porn (where at least you can often see the face). It’s the kind of misogynist metonymy that at least has come to be recognized (if not eliminated) in product advertising, but apparently still goes unremarked in issue or values advertising – even though its major function is to promote the value of dehumanizing women. That it does reflect and promote the right-wing vision of women goes without saying: women as pregnant vessels who are not even named or acknowledged, and certainly have no interests or needs that deserve to be addressed in their own right, could hardly be better illustrated than by photographs of them as exactly that, used in campaigns aimed at denigrating women’s interests in favor of the “interests” of an unborn fetus.

It’s infuriating to see progressive groups use such images and tactics. This goes beyond simply bowing to the reality of the  right’s indifference to women by finding another “hook” for an issue; this actively embraces and endorses its dehumanizing methods in order to use them for that other issue – exactly what the right wants. What I want is something better than this from nominal allies.

Happy Fetus

Feto Incognito

Adam Lambert Embryo

The purveyor of the site insists that “Feti is just for fun, no political statements being made here.” I’m tempted to believe that in her case, but the thing still strikes me as weird,  and indicative of a mindset that is worth noting.

The vendor suggests these are intended as gifts for expectant parents, as appropriate additions to the “Baby’s First _____” category of remembrances. (Exactly how, I’m not sure: “Baby’s First Disembodied Hanging on a Christmas Tree”?) In that vein, they play off the very common and understandable practice of many expectant parents in personifying their fetus as it develops – talking to it, playing music, naming it before it is born, and so on. They also seem to accept as a cultural commonplace the fetishizing – literally, in this case! – and personifying of the fetus that is a mainstay of anti-choice propaganda. (Anti-choicers often wear gold-plated fetal-footprint jewelry, and they are forever trying to force abortion patients to look at pictures or sonograms of the fetus.)

I don’t know if the anti-choice movement has so far succeeded in turning the fetus into a fetish object that you can now literally market them to the general public as holiday ornaments, or if the common desire to see fetuses as sort of reverse-extensions of babies simply makes this a natural marketing move, like Cabbage Patch dolls or those weird Anne Geddes photographs of babies in flower petals, and the right wing has merely piggybacked off that common emotional trope for their own purposes. The former would scare me a bit, the latter is merely infuriating. Either way, this sort of thing leaves me with a creepy feeling.

I’m happy for people to be happy about their pregnancies, and to embue their future offspring with emotional valence or even a somewhat overgrandiose sense of promise or accomplishment. In the same way that all parents think their kids are smart and talented, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that, expectant parents can and should go ga-ga over the cute little buns in their respective ovens. There is no point, in the case of people’s emotional experience of the events in their lives, to go around insisting to them “you know it has no functional higher nervous system, right?” . . . “that’s not a ‘person’ you’re carrying, in any meaningful sense of the term – just wanted to let you know” . . . “don’t get too close to it – there’s about a 1-in-12 chance you’ll lose the pregnancy”. But when it comes to law and policy-making, clear distinctions do have to be made – and at that point, the conflict between stark reality and parents’ expectations may be uncomfortable.

Regardless of parental beliefs, not all kids are smart or talented, and thus some won’t make it into selective academic or sports or art programs. And regardless of the fervent, desperately dishonest myth-making of the anti-choice right, the early fetus is not a person and does not make moral claims on a woman’s body and life sufficient to override her autonomy. It is unfortunate to have to disappoint people emotionally invested in believing otherwise, but it is far worse to make policy based on wishful thinking in defiance of the truth.

By all means, have yourself a merry little Christmas, and hang a smiling Adam Lambert Jewish punk fetus upon the highest bough. But let’s keep the “personified fetus” myth firmly in its place when we go to making important decisions about real issues in real people’s lives.

It is.

Thanks, Penn.

(See here for a similar observation from an equally-surprising source.)

The real question is whether those who are so agitated about real or imagined terrorism of other kinds (especially by Muslims), and who have been so complacently accepting of anti-woman terrorism in the US for decades, will condemn or even acknowledge an open statement of Christian religious-terrorist ideology in the case of yet another anti-choice fanatic.

Just this week we’ve seen a terrible mass murder committed by a Muslim military officer who was apparently distraught over the war in Afghanistan and his possible deployment. Literally before the bodies were cool, various right-wingers jumped in to denounce “Muslim terrorism” and to cite vague links between the suspect and Al Qaeda (he visited a mosque which was also visited by someone who knew someone who was connected with Al Qaeda); however, it is not clear that the apparent perpetrator’s motives were intended for a political end at all – as opposed to merely an outburst of personal anxiety – and there is little to suggest that it was terrorism in any reasonable sense. The murders of doctors by anti-choicers, beyond any question, are defined by the features of terrorism found in most of the commonly-used definitions: they are acts of violence committed against civilians for the purpose of inciting fear in other, third-party individuals, to promote a particular political end. We heard nothing of this at the time of Dr. Tiller’s death (nor of any of the previous murders and other acts of violence); will we hear it acknowledged now that the terrorist has so openly proclaimed his murderous religious ideology?

Anti-choice terrorism is intended to prevent women from exercising a legal and moral right involving their bodily health and autonomy, by terrorizing those women and their healthcare providers – it is violence intended not merely against its chosen (often random) targets, but to terrorize and thus paralyze a larger group, to further the religious and political ideology of the perpetrators and their vast army of supporters and admirers within the religious right. Yet it has never been acknowledged as such, and the large subculture on the right wing who have made a profession of terrorism scare-mongering have never acknowledged the persistent anti-choice terrorism ongoing in the US. (Nor has the FBI: fake anthrax attacks had been staged on almost 700 abortion clinics in the US in the days before 9/11 – not one of them resulted in an arrest, or any obvious urgency about the issue, and they were not treated as domestic terrorism. One person was charged with terrorism for fake anthrax attacks on clinics in the wake of 9/11 and the Congress anthrax mail attacks – the first and only such charge in the entire history of anti-choice terrorism. None of the anti-choice murderers, including Roeder, have been charged as terrorists.)

Now we have an admitted terrorist openly advocating further political killings to promote his religious obsessions. If Roeder were a Muslim and his targets were not women and their healthcare providers, the shrieking loons of the right would be off their heads screaming about his crime, his religious beliefs, his unrepentant stance, his advocacy and rationalization of violence, and his links to other extremists with similar religious and political beliefs. Will we see even the slightest acknowledgment of Christian anti-choice religious terrorism and its dangers in this blatant case?

The bill on offer is far from optimal. It locks in the profiteering on death and misery that the vast majority of the country is burdened with, and is needlessly complicated and limited in what it offers to the rest. It deliberately cripples its own modest offering by restricting it only to those whom the profiteers have absolutely refused to serve at any price, prohibiting the rest of the country from accessing healthcare organized on any saner and more humane basis. But worst of all, the bill is being held hostage by the insane and vicious anti-choice army that infests the right wing and has wholly captured the Republican party. And, too predictably, the omnipresent contingent of grandstanding asshole Democrats is giving them exactly what they want, as they always do.

Right now, the “Stupak amendment” is being debated: an amendment that will prohibit any person enrolling in the government-backed “healthcare exchange” – which is to say, the poorest and most desperate, who are the only ones eligibel to enroll in that plan – from being offered a full range of healthcare services in cases of unwanted pregnancy. For those people, the “public options” will be forced pregnancy, death in childbirth, or an abortion that she likely can’t afford and the right-wing terrorists have likely made unavailable anyway. The Republican House caucus has already stated explicitly that they will refuse to vote for the healthcare bill in any form. But they – with their unconscionable Democratic allies – are holding up the bill to demand the anti-choice amendment in a bill they will not support even if they get it. And enough Democrats are equally indifferent to women’s lives and women’s needs to help them do it.

Democratic women are putting up a good fight – and their male allies deserve thanks, too. The Republicans have shrunk from merely legislative misogyny to outright thuggery, as they so commonly do. Michele Bachman led crowds of right wingers through the Congressional office buildings earlier today, invading offices and screaming at people to, in her words, “scare” them away from supporting women and healthcare for all. House Republicans staged an organized disruption on the floor today, systematically interrupting Democratic women as they spoke in favor of women’s interests and full healthcare coverage. The healthcare debate is being conducted the same way the Florida recount was in 2000: in the face of Republican assaults and intimidation, and without regard for the truth or significance of the actual substantive issue.

I have little to say about the whole thing. I feel helpless – particularly frustrating in the face of an issue so central to my personal and professional concerns – and am waiting as on election night for the outcome of votes that will – with great good luck – mean so much to so many, and move American one huge step closer to the decency and commitment to humanity that has been so sadly lacking in so much of our history. I can only wait and hope, like everyone else. In the meantime, there is an organized, vicious, and relentless minority that is fiercely dedicated to their own hostility to any notion of a decent regard for others, and to the freedom of others to live their own lives unconstrained by that minority’s backward and reactionary values. They are fighting – in the most literal sense – right now to keep tens of millions of people at the mercy of any illness they may suffer, to keep hundreds of millions at the mercy of an insurance system that rivals only those reactionaries themselves in its hostility to the needs of the people they nominally serve, and to keep every woman in America at the mercy of the nasty and bitter men who despise them and their bodies.

I can’t stand watching this unfold. And I can’t say, can’t express even fractionally, how much, how gut-wrenchingly much, I hate and revile these disgusting creeps.

UPDATE: Rayne at Firedoglake reports “Stupak Amendment Passes: 64 Dems Ask for Primary Opponents“. That’s exactly how I feel about it. I had already promised myself that I would contribute to the primary opponents of any misogynist Democrats; I’m saddened, and shocked, that there are so many of them. I will certainly target all that I can afford to. Read the rest of the post; it’s exactly right.

UPDATE: The final bill has passed, 220 – 215. Exactly one Republican voted in favor – 39 Democrats voted to withhold healthcare from over 40 million Americans. This is a great – but very partial – victory. There still remains the Senate bill – which will be a far tougher fight, with looser rules and a larger percentage of heartless and misogynist Democrats in the mix – followed by the conference committee and the final vote. The Republicans and reactionaries will do everything they can to destroy other people’s hopes for a decent life, and their control over their own bodies and life plans – the rioting, disruption, demagoguery and thuggery seen today are just a taste of what is coming. And this step, momentous as it is, comes bitterly. The discussion in the followup post at Firedoglake captures it perfectly; as one commenter put it: “It’s like winning a huge battle, but half of your friends were killed or wounded.”

UPDATE: I’ve added the reference to Democrats in the headline. I didn’t make it clear above that Bart Stupak, who led the charge to destroy healthcare reform for over 300 million Americans if they didn’t let him destroy autonomy for 150 million female Americans, is a Democrat. Along with 63 other misogynist traitors, he put the people’s party against 51% of the people, to indulge their personal medieval religious obsessions. Fuck him and all of them.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gets the power dynamic exactly right: “Certainly, there are many potential criticisms of how Democratic leadership has dealt with health care, although when you actually care about expanding access to health care it’s hard to negotiate with the Stupaks of the world who don’t, but want to use other people’s progressive impulses to attack women.”

For this reason, I felt less shock than merely tired recognition at this week’s reports from the right-wing “Value Voters” conference, in particular the much-remarked insanity of anti-choice provocateur Lila Rose’s demand that abortions be “done in the public square” (“maybe then we might hear angels singing as we ponder the glory of conception”*). Of course it’s idiotic, outrageous, and unhinged; of course it’s meaningless as a serious policy proposal. But it was never intended to be otherwise. It was intended to do exactly what it did – get more attention for a serial attention-seeker whose stock in trade is saying provocative things on video so she can enjoy the reaction, as well as create yet another controversy to make anti-choice theater seem important by generating press.

But it’s worth taking a moment, not to combat this nonsense as if it was to be taken seriously, nor even to condemn the continual offensiveness and provocation of the anti-choice movement (a singularly unlikely complaint, since without that the anti-choice movement wouldn’t even exist), but to note the ways in which anti-choicers choose to offend.

What does it mean to imagine – even if only to create offense – that women should be forced to have their abortions in public? As crazed as the suggestion is, it is not as extreme, from the right-wing perspective, as it would seem from any decent point of view. Mandatory public display of intimate gynecological procedures in order to diminish the legal availability of those procedures is nothing more than the literal instantiation of the basic presuppositions of the anti-choice movement in general:

• that women seeking abortion, uniquely, must be denied any presumption of privacy (in the sense either of autonomous choice or of confidentiality);
• that women’s sexuality is fodder for public observation, examination, and commentary;
• that women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, and women’s needs are so inherently disgusting that merely observing them will create the same visceral hostility among the general public that they already receive from the right wing (and that the general level of support for abortion that has always existed is due merely to the fact that supporters haven’t yet seen women’s bodies and healthcare up close yet);
• that women’s choices, preferences, and comfort in their own bodily autonomy and healthcare count for nothing against the demands by those who hate them that they expose themselves to hostile scrutiny for those others’ political goals;
• that policy regarding women’s autonomy and health is appropriately decided by deliberately-manipulated public emotions – in which tactic the women may be forced to participate to their own detriment – and not any considered defense of the women’s moral agency and interests, or the objective absence of moral agency in the fetus.

As with so much anti-choice agitation, women simply disappear from this invasive and offensive scheme as persons to be taken seriously in their own right. Healthcare is granted near-sacrosanct status as regards privacy, discretion, and the centrality of the needs and interests of the patient, but a woman seeking abortion must expose herself, legs splayed in stirrups, vagina dilated, instruments inserted, “in the public square” – her needs and interests, in fact her basic humanity as a person deserving of consideration and dignity, carry no weight against the creepy, invasive perversions of the sex-obsessive misogynists. The abortion debate is structured, logically, as a conflict between women’s autonomy and the religious imperatives of the anti-choice right wing, but here there is no recognition of autonomy interests at play in any way – women not only may not control their bodies or reproductive options, but may even be forced into invasive and degrading displays deliberately intended to undermine their own autonomy, as a condition of (temporarily) accessing such options. As always, women simply don’t count. Whatever protections and privileges the typical moral person might command in undertaking their own purposes in their own life simply vanish if that person is a woman seeking control over her reproduction.

But this familiar moral blindness is not accidental, and it is not merely the hyperbolic implication of a deliberately provocative suggestion. Stupid, crazy, and nasty as they may be, the right wing is not completely incapable of recognizing moral humanity, even in those they despise. The right wing gradually learned not to use racial slurs; today it would unthinkable for them to suggest that people of color should be paraded “in the public square” even as a tactic to undermine their rights, and wingers fall over themselves denying the racism in their racist policies. The gay-rights movement, embattled as it was, made remarkable progress in the space of about 35 years; today, the conservative position on gay rights extols accommodations (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; civil unions) that would have been grand liberal victories just a few years previously. Yet after thousands of years of patriarchy, women command no such deference. Even as a joke or a provocation, there are things that are not said about minorities and gays – things the public would reject in disgust. There seems to be nothing the right wing won’t say about women – there seem to be no abuses or humiliations that are beyond the pale, no degradations or invasions that are unthinkable, whether or not they seem likely as policy.

Vacating medical confidentiality to publicize abortions for the explicit purpose of humiliating women by generating disgust at their bodies, healthcare, and reproductive choices?  The only part of that scenario the right wing objects to is the abortion. All the rest is merely the rights, interests, and choices of women. Nothing at all, really.

* I am not making this up.

First off, it doesn’t matter who call themselves what – bodily autonomy is a fundamental part of women’s freedom and moral independence, and must be protected regardless of public opinion. Laws trampling women’s freedom are unjustified no matter how many people support them. To the extent that the political balance shifts – or is even seen to shift – the legislative practicalities of safeguarding women’s status as citizens and full moral persons becomes complicated, but that is only a measure of the misogyny of a political system that puts some citizens’ freedom at the hazard of other citizens’ whims and prejudices.

Second, it’s interesting to note that, while the supposed balance between self-identifying pro- and anti-choicers has shifted, the same poll of the very same respondents shows almost no change in opinion on the broad spectrum of options regarding the legality of abortion. (It does show that those holding the extreme anti-freedom position – no abortions ever for anyone – slightly outnumber those holding a full pro-freedom position – abortion legal under all circumstances – also for the first time, and that in general attitudes toward women’s freedom have harshened slightly across each category, but those shifts are only a few percentage points.) So, what has changed is the labels people apply to themselves, not so much what they actually think in practical terms.

Regarding that shift in labels, it strikes me as odd. Gallup is a reputable pollster, and this is a periodical survey they have been doing at intervals for some time. I would normally accept their findings, but this one is clearly anomalous. A shift from 50% pro-choice/44% anti-choice to a balance of 42/51 the other way is a relative shift of 16% in just one year (i.e., the pro-choice position went from up by 7% to down by 9%). It dwarfs the year-to-year shifts at any other point since at least 1995 (the range shown on their graph), and probably longer. That requires an explanation.

The situation becomes more intriguing when you note that, as Gallup discovered:

The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners. . . . [A]ll of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates; the abortion views of political liberals have not changed.

So: right-wingers have not greatly changed their views on abortion in practical terms, but have shifted considerably toward explicitly identifying themselves as anti-choice. Hmmm . . .

I’ll tentatively float two hypotheses:

First, this is part of the winger backlash. The same sort of thing that is driving gun nuts to stockpile firearms and ammunition so they’ll have something Obama can pry from their cold dead hands, and which is driving anti-government morons to protest the fact that Obama is giving them a tax cut, is also driving anti-sex misogynists to stake out seemingly more-extreme positions on women’s rights: they’re terrified that they’re about to lose the thing that defines them politically, and they are ratcheting up their rhetoric both out of fear and in order to remain relevant. With right-wing and religious groups in a panic over the Republicans’ loss of Congress and the White House, and responding with ever-more-extremist rhetoric on abortion, the public has become superficially polarized. (In a country where you can get thousands of low-tax advocates to join a protest against their own tax cut just by giving it an idiotic name, it’s not surprising you can get misogynists to call themselves “pro-life” if you scream it at them enough.)

Second, this is also part of long-standing winger hypocrisy on abortion. They want to be morally righteous hardliners, but they don’t want major changes in abortion rights because they also avail themselves of that service in considerable (for Catholics, greater than average) numbers. As with many other public policy issues, conservatives retain their far-right rhetoric while gradually accommodating themselves to modern reality. (Remember when “civil unions” was the progressive option for gay rights?*) Now, apparently, among the group that say they are anti-choice, more than half favor legal abortion “under certain circumstances”.

This is not to minimize the importance of these kinds of data, or of shifts, even if only nominal (in the literal sense), between the two broad categories of opinion on women’s freedom. It matters not only that women have a legal right to abortion, but also that it is not constantly under siege by disingenuous and insidious restrictions, and that women are supported in choosing and exercising the options that are right for them. Public opinion is important to all those issues. And this reported shift in opinion, even if it is more superficial than it seems, is evidence both of the continuing right-wing backlash and of the continuing negligible status of women and their moral and civil liberties. The “certain circumstances” the pro-choice misogynists deign to approve are likely only the most restrictive cases, and the ones they find politically untenable.

Continuing to engage the fight for women’s true freedom, and a reasonable understanding of moral personhood and the assignment of legal rights, is more vital than ever as the backlash grows. I remain optimistic in the long term – reality cannot be evaded forever – but this is not good news in the immediate term, there’s no question about that. Fundamentally, and especially given how thin the poll results are on practical issues, I think little has changed. Given where things stood already, though, that’s hardly reason to be satisfied.

* Obama certainly does!

NB: Crossposted to Lean Left, the politics blog I contribute to.