210. FORENSIC VAGINA SPECIALISTS AND THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEN

From the Archives

(April 2006) Random factoid: people who are employed to check vaginas for evidence of abortions are referred to as forensic vagina specialists.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield has written Manliness, a celebration of privilege that Yale University Press recently published.

(Poor Harv. I guess his own school wouldn’t publish this sexist diatribe so hot on the heels of ousting its own prez because of his propensity to mutter sexist crapola.)

Mansfield claims that women secretly like housework and enjoy changing diapers whereas men not so secretly like war and look down on so-called women’s work.

“Now that women are equal,” he asserts, “women should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite."

Equal? Huh? In what universe?

Slide down from your ivory tower on your own slug slime Harv and check out the Really World where salary inequities and cliterectomies and misogyny and religious bias etc. etc. etc. keep far too many women under the thumbs of violent and controlling men

(who, let me guess, are just being men when they claim such authority as their own—at least according to your neat calculations).

This inequality is happening at a time when men are intent on depriving women of the very right to control our own bodies too (yet some of these same men sue when they are forced to support their offspring).

Example: The National Center for Men—that poor downtrodden group—has filed a lawsuit they’ve dubbed Roe v. Wade for Men on behalf of a twenty-something-year-old man who claims that he should not have to pay child support because the woman he impregnated told him that she was on birth control and thought she was infertile.

So let me guess: Harvey and his ilk believe that the stripper who was allegedly gang-raped at Duke should bear the child if she becomes pregnant as a result of the alleged assault, but that the thugs who allegedly raped her should not be held accountable because boys—the poor testosterone-driven things—will be boys.

Meanwhile The National Center for Men continues to express outrage about how freaking unfair it is that men tend to die earlier than women.

(I am so goddamn SICK of hearing men celebrate their bad behavior while whining about the fact that they will be held accountable for this same behavior!)

As Kimberly Gadette says in Wake Up and Smell the Diapers,

consuming cheese doodles and beer and lolling on the couch does not make for longevity. Darn the luck, if only men liked housework. By getting off that sofa and washing a floor, scrubbing a toilet, raising a kid, they, too, might live longer.

Reality bites, iron boyz.

Meanwhile, I wish I were attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham instead of working, especially because this year’s festival includes a special Class in America series.

(I say that with some level of irony, since my ex-wife’s best friend’s very upper-crust British father—a man who celebrates his classism and privilege but is way too effete to ever succeed at the physical requirements of being a soldier and so maybe isn't really a man after all according to Harvey's definition—is one of the judges who selected this year’s films. )

Okay. I need to pour my homemade soy parsley soup into a Tupperware and scram now . . .

. . . but first, I forgot to mention that I had Lucinda screaming on my iPod last night while walking and was so distracted that I damn near stepped on a great blue heron, which startled the bejeezus out of both of us. Its beak was nipple height and its beautiful body was so close to mine that I felt the wind from its wings as it flew away. Wow!

LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshees

READING: An article about domestic violence

SANG IN SHOWER: America's “Daisy Jane” (from my junior-high-school daze)

BEST-OF SPAM: “go longer for her” (Oh I do baby. I do.)

199. A NEW DARK AGES, OR, REMEMBERING AWE

From the Archives

(Monday • 6 March 2006) I’m thinking about faith.

Many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and mysticism of their faith but cannot in good conscience participate in what they describe as a repressive and greedy organization. These days, their evolving spiritual practices include worshipping the moon or Spiderwoman weaving this big world. Others have joined Unitarian Universalist fellowships. And others use energy work and meditation to fill the void.

I once worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings that we used as stealth offices. Priests’ or nuns’ bedrooms were off limits, but everyone otherwise walked freely between apartments, setting up women’s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and delivering humanitarian aid to Central America; writing inclusive non-hierarchical lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death penalty and to free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing and creating an inclusive non-hierarchical Bible; thwarting the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who oppose women’s equality.

The founders of this organization—a Jesuit priest and nun—have since been excommunicated, but their work goes on.

One of the many things I learned as we ate our hummus and bean sprout sandwiches was that the now rabidly anti-choice Catholic church actually allowed abortions until the late 1800s, when the pope conveniently declared abortion an excommunicable offense just as France’s diminishing birth rates threatened its ability to maintain a strong army.

(Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible soon after this decree.)

Matthew Fox, another radical Catholic, said

There are two Christianities in our midst. One worships a punitive father and seeks obedience at all costs. It is patriarchal, demonizes woman, the earth, science, gays, lesbians and deep thought. It builds on fear and it supports empire-builders. Its theology includes a Punitive Father in the Sky and teaches original sin.

The other Christianity recognizes the Original Blessing that all beings derive from. We recognize awe, not sin, not guilt, as the starting point of true religion. We recognize a Divinity who is source of all things and is as much mother as father, as much female as male. We honor creation and diversity. When God created everything, He pronounced it all good. We are here to make love to life. Yes, we are here to make love to life… Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions….

We live in the midst of a suicidal economy, motivated by love of money. We have reached a dead end. What we need to turn it around are hearts in love with life. How do we do it? We first must move from domination to partnership and we begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence which leads to gratitude which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation, to regain awe. The 3 R’s need to be balanced by the 10 C’s; contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony and character.

I don’t recognize a divinity as the source of all things but do recognize that it is possible that we, plants and animals and people alike, could make up a larger soul (but not in an icky Borg way).

And we certainly make up boocoodles of matter and antimatter.

I also favor the notion of honoring creation and diversity, and appreciate the notion of being here to make love to life and delight in creation and take our dreams into our politics and institutions.

As Barbara Kingsolver says,

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides.

LISTENING TO: Ferron (Beware you sagging diplomats for you will not hear one gun, and though oceans lie between us, we will not be undone. And it won't take long . . .)
READING: Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes
BEST-OF SPAM: A cure for every disease!

166. CAUSE AND EFFECT

From the Archive

(October 2005) A writer in The Nation points out that, while we focus our attention on whether or not Supreme Court nominees will overturn Roe v. Wade, Bush is stacking the courts with pro-business judges.

I worry that, as a culture, we have such a short attention span that we have already forgotten the Hurricane Katrina debacle because, hey, Brittany Spears had a baby!

Yet this debacle made clear the folly of giving precedence to private financial gain over actual human lives.

And speaking of giving less than a shit about people who live in poverty (or are sliding into it as the middle class vanishes), Bush Inc. has allowed Florida to limit Medicaid benefits. Their approved plan says that “the state will set aside a specific amount of money for each person enrolled in Medicaid,” based on the citizen’s medical condition and historical use of health care.

And the state is now allowed to limit the “amount, duration and scope” of services.

Did you pick up on that historic use of health care? That’s cause and effect from a White House that makes value judgments on human lives.

You’re a poor black New Orleanian? Well, you probably live a sinful life in that den of iniquity and voted Democrat and ate southern/soul food that ain’t real healthy, so you are expendable now, baby.

And, since you inconvenienced us by not drowining at the get-go, we’ll make sure you know how valuable your life is to us now.

Hmm. Says right here that you have been treated for bronchitis twice now, yet you choose to continue to smoke.

No treatment for you.

And you eat the starchy food that poor people can afford instead of grilling out a nice healthy salmon filets?

We choose to not pay for sins.

GOP cause-and-effect never extends to exacting payment from the corporations that pollute our environment and make us all sick with their pollutants, however.

So my question is this: Now that Florida can legally set a ceiling on insurance spending per person per year and per lifetime, what will JEB and W do with the next Terry Schiavo when she meets her insurance cap?

Inquiring minds want to know.

(Actually, Bush Inc. is making it harder to declare bankruptcy too, so I suppose Schiavo’s spouse will be stuck with the bills and a vegetable he can’t put out of her misery.)

•

One of my former roommates—a public-health advocate—decided to go to medical school because she saw the writing on the wall about Roe v. Wade and wanted to be in a position to set up illegal abortion clinics à la the Redstockings when the time comes.

And sometimes I believe I’m going to wind up pursuing Constitutional law in an effort to battle these Christianists who want to rewrite our rights.

(Note to self: send more $ to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.)

Meanwhile, Steve Satterwhite of The Texas Observer interviewed some of fundies who want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and civil unions (i.e., who are working to codify discrimination against a portion of the citizenry) and what they said is just astounding. These people really do want to destroy our Constitution! And what they pass off as fact with such confidence just baffles the mind.

Satterwhite points out the echo-chamber phenomenon that I have discovered with my fundie students—a tendency to use the same phrases and inaccurate statistics to argue the same points (which some liberals do too, of course). Many (in the classroom and in this article) quote “widely discredited reports by Paul Cameron,” the man who started the urban legend about queers inserting hamsters into their rectums.

This doctor was dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association in 1983 because he did not meet professional codes of ethics and conduct, yet his lies continue to make the circuit as facts.

Example. Mary Ann Markarain from Sugar Land said

Sin is sin. We're not animals. [oh?] We're people, and I do not believe that you're born homosexual. They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls. God knows when we're born what we're supposed to be.

The proof is in the pudding. Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter. Forty-seven percent of all males engage in fisting, the act of placing their fist in their partner's rectum for sexual pleasure. Twenty-nine percent of all homosexual males engage in golden showers—the practice of lying on the floor, typically nude, and allowing their partner to urinate on them. This is abnormal. These are things I've never read in the newspaper. This isn't something you hear about on CNN. But this is something that is taking place.

Now I know this is not real pleasant, but the truth needs to come out. When we say the word “gay,” we're really just hiding because we're really not understanding what that word really entails—what it means, what people are doing, and why this can hurt society as a whole. It's never been an accepted lifestyle. If we allow this to become accepted, then the numbers will grow astronomically. Now they want to take it into the classroom, to teach our children that this is okay. Our society is two to three percent gay, but if you teach children that homosexuality is okay, then we're going to have a lot of problems.

The median age of homosexual men dying with AIDS is 39 years old; that's wrong, not natural. The median age of all other homosexual men dying from other causes is 42. Do you consider 42 young? I consider it extremely young since I'm one year away from it. The median age of death for lesbians is 45 years old—of lesbians. That compares to 75 years old for heterosexual men and 79 for heterosexual women. Only one percent of homosexuals die of old age; only three percent ever live to age 55. Think about it, and then tell me that God doesn't have some problem with this whole thing—that God isn't speaking. It's unnecessary to put my name in the paper—you can just say that "God said," and here's the statistics.

Where did Mary Ann from Sugar Land learn these woefully inaccurate statistics and how many more people wrote them down and believe them after Cameron shared them on hate radio?

Monte Watkins from Houston said A few years ago, my husband and I were at one of the [Gay Pride Week parades]. After the parade broke up, some of them walked by us, talking to each other, but I heard them look around and say, “Mess with us, and we'll rape your kids."

Yeah. Sure you did.

Alan Ward of Stephenville said

There is a natural way that human beings are crafted to operate, and that is on a heterosexual basis.
We had a homosexual in my family, a young man. During high school, he learned to be gay; he wasn't before that. Was that different for my family? You bet it was, because we are a family of heterosexuals who really believe in being heterosexual.

About two years ago, that young man learned not to be homosexual, and he has a girlfriend now. Right in the midst of all this social controversy, he learned to be gay, and then he learned not to be. I've seen him changed, and I've seen two or three or four changed.

Logically, [policing sexual behavior] is out of the reach of the government, but I'm not saying that I believe it should be.

There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That's not possible. There is not enough manpower.

I’ll say there’s not (and ever heard of the Right to Privacy?).

Of course, many Christianists deny scientific evidence anyway, so reminding them that homosexuality exists in many species, that's it's a naturally occurring deviation from the norm, is ineffective. And it doesn’t seem to occur to them that their god could have made some people homosexual on purpose just as he made some of us, say, left-handed—that maybe this is a gift, as my friend Louisville and some Native-American tribes call it.

Nope it’s a choice, pure and simple.

But so is believing in myths, dude. And you don’t get to rewrite our nation’s constitution based on your myths and unsupportable lies and smear campaigns.

BEST-OF SPAM: Just a reminder; Our University Enrollment department has been trying to contact you. The date for enrolling in our 2-week degree program is ending on Friday, October 28, 2005. As of now we can only offer you a BA, BSc, or a MA. If you enroll by the due date then your degree of choice and transcripts can be sent to you within 2 weeks.