The GOP's War on Women

[Alerik the Fortunate]

There is a motive of sexual abuse, though. The GOP legislators are requiring this specifically to sexually humiliate women they deem deserve it. You're going to take all this, you dirty little slut. It doesn't matter that their using their legal powers to operate at a distance, coercing intermediaries to do the actual deed for them. It doesn't matter whether they actually get off on thinking about the process (I wouldn't be surprised if a few actually do, but I doubt most do). It's still a form of rape. And what about women who are getting an abortion because they were raped? Doesn't forcing them to be penetrated for no medical reason call to mind the violation that put them in that position in the first place? It serves to remind them that the state, or rather those ruling it, holds her in much the same contempt as the original rapist did. Calling it rape isn't entirely inappropriate.

[Eleas]

...which may stem from warped views on sexuality, or sexual obsession, or sexual frustration. The 'rape for the sake of dominating women' isn't psychologically impossible, but as a mainstream answer it is an extension of the 'social construction of gender' bullshit that came out of the neofeminist (or third-wave feminism, I believe it's called) thinking I was talking about.

These things do not logically connect. Do you have any proof of this assertion, that is, that 'gender as a social construct' doctrinally leads to 'rape for the sake of dominating' in third-wave feminism, a creed notorious for its myriad different takes on the matter? If so, I'd love to hear it.

[Lagmonster]

There is a motive of sexual abuse, though. The GOP legislators are requiring this specifically to sexually humiliate women they deem deserve it. You're going to take all this, you dirty little slut. It doesn't matter that their using their legal powers to operate at a distance, coercing intermediaries to do the actual deed for them. It doesn't matter whether they actually get off on thinking about the process (I wouldn't be surprised if a few actually do, but I doubt most do).

That sounds like you're making an assumption about their motives based on how you feel about them. I mean, maybe you've got some quote somewhere where a politician admits he just wants to punish sluts, but otherwise, why create cartoonish caricatures with villainous motives when it's perfectly plausible that they are simply justifying it based on a belief that a fetus is a person? On its face, the idea of a righteous hypocrite wanking to the thought of punishing sluts doesn't sound any less over-the-top than the silly imagery they sometimes conjure to describe liberals.

And what about women who are getting an abortion because they were raped? Doesn't forcing them to be penetrated for no medical reason call to mind the violation that put them in that position in the first place? It serves to remind them that the state, or rather those ruling it, holds her in much the same contempt as the original rapist did. Calling it rape isn't entirely inappropriate.

...to you. TO YOU. Add those two fucking words, already, if you want me to agree with you. You haven't spent one fucking line of this post where you're not telling me what other people are thinking and feeling. Legislators must be thinking this; rape victims must be feeling that. Shut the fuck up; A grown woman can weigh her own goddamn feelings. If after all that, she decides to go through with it, and wants to call her congressman a skeezy voyeur and her doctor an accessory to rape, I have no problem with that; let her appeal to the law as she sees fit and may she recieve the support and compensation she deserves. But I think its ridiculous to default to thinking that all rape victims are of such a fragile constitution that they will never be able to feel anything other than a traumatic association.

[Terralthra]

There is a motive of sexual abuse, though. The GOP legislators are requiring this specifically to sexually humiliate women they deem deserve it. You're going to take all this, you dirty little slut. It doesn't matter that their using their legal powers to operate at a distance, coercing intermediaries to do the actual deed for them. It doesn't matter whether they actually get off on thinking about the process (I wouldn't be surprised if a few actually do, but I doubt most do).

That sounds like you're making an assumption about their motives based on how you feel about them. I mean, maybe you've got some quote somewhere where a politician admits he just wants to punish sluts, but otherwise, why create cartoonish caricatures with villainous motives when it's perfectly plausible that they are simply justifying it based on a belief that a fetus is a person? On its face, the idea of a righteous hypocrite wanking to the thought of punishing sluts doesn't sound any less over-the-top than the silly imagery they sometimes conjure to describe liberals.

Follow that chain of logic. How does one justify putting a condom-covered 8" probe into a woman's vagina on the belief that a fetus is a person? What are the intermediate steps?

[Lagmonster]

Follow that chain of logic. How does one justify putting a condom-covered 8" probe into a woman's vagina on the belief that a fetus is a person? What are the intermediate steps?

I've heard this one right from a conservative's lips, actually: They can't prevent the abortion, only try to sway the woman against it by making her feel the same way about it as they do. So they mandate a procedure designed to demonstrate that 'fact' to the woman by showing a heartbeat or anthromorphic shape or something to which she might become sympathetic. If the woman can be made to believe, she might change her mind, and the life is saved. Bear in mind that the connection doesn't have to make sense - they just have to be earnest or honest about it, since my current problem is with the cartoon villains and damsels in distress he's decided these people must be.

But I'll help you out; you can easily crack my opinion if you can show that the procedure itself is ineffective or inappropriate at accomplishing that goal. Because there'd be no falling back from that position; if a less invasive method were as effective or more so, that would make it look more like they specifically chose a method that WAS emotionally or physically uncomfortable as a means of deterrant in and of itself.

[Terralthra]

That's simple enough. Traditional obstetric ultrasounds are done by placing the transducer on the abdomen, and in the vast majority of cases, provide images of the embryo or fetus that is equally good, or even better. Transvaginal ultrasounds are medically necessary in a very slim fraction of cases, yet the laws being copy-pasted in conservative states (let's hear it for ALEC) mandate transvaginal for no medical reason. Some specify that even if an abdominal ultrasound is more appropriate, a transvaginal one be done regardless.

[UnderAGreySky]

This is turning out to be a bit of a semantic argument, so I'm going to accept that Broomstick et al have a different opinion than I do, and that since some of those opposing my view happen to be women they will have a significantly different perspective on things than I do.

But there's always something new in the war on women. Today, a legislator from Arizona - a woman, no less - has gone on to say:

"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a "surgical procedure". If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."

In an e-mail to Insider, Proud defended her statement, saying women should be aware of any surgical procedure “especially when a foreign object is extracting from a delicate organ

It just gets more insane.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

That sounds like you're making an assumption about their motives based on how you feel about them. I mean, maybe you've got some quote somewhere where a politician admits he just wants to punish sluts, but otherwise, why create cartoonish caricatures with villainous motives when it's perfectly plausible that they are simply justifying it based on a belief that a fetus is a person? On its face, the idea of a righteous hypocrite wanking to the thought of punishing sluts doesn't sound any less over-the-top than the silly imagery they sometimes conjure to describe liberals.

From their own lips. I neglected to post those links in my initial comment because I had assumed they are common knowledge. I'm not saying that all conservatives who disagree with abortion and who see this as a useful way to discourage them think this way, but the legislators who propose and defend this legislation show by their own words that they do think this way. They are power mad misogynists, and they feel that once a woman has lost her virtue, she has ceded the right to say no in the future. Whether they are explicitly sexually gratified by the thought is irrelevant. They want to sexually humiliate a woman whose lifestyle they disagree with.

...to you. TO YOU. Add those two fucking words, already, if you want me to agree with you. You haven't spent one fucking line of this post where you're not telling me what other people are thinking and feeling. Legislators must be thinking this; rape victims must be feeling that. Shut the fuck up; A grown woman can weigh her own goddamn feelings. If after all that, she decides to go through with it, and wants to call her congressman a skeezy voyeur and her doctor an accessory to rape, I have no problem with that; let her appeal to the law as she sees fit and may she recieve the support and compensation she deserves. But I think its ridiculous to default to thinking that all rape victims are of such a fragile constitution that they will never be able to feel anything other than a traumatic association.

I'm not speaking for myself. My wife and many other women I have spoken to voiced the opinion themselves. She used to work with rape victims for the Sexual Assault Response Service(and many of her current clients are rape vicitims, since she deals with the mentally ill). It does not require that every victim relive the experience for it to be rape. Some will not object strenuously if it means they get the procedure. Some will be unnecessarily traumatized, though. That is the point: to make it traumatic so that they change their minds. Rape as a form of social control. You may write that off as more feminist theorizing, but it seems obviously implicit in the choice of words used by legislators. Why should anyone, anyone, be made to go through with an unnecessary procedure whose sole purpose is to make one uncomfortable?

[Bakustra]

...which may stem from warped views on sexuality, or sexual obsession, or sexual frustration. The 'rape for the sake of dominating women' isn't psychologically impossible, but as a mainstream answer it is an extension of the 'social construction of gender' bullshit that came out of the neofeminist (or third-wave feminism, I believe it's called) thinking I was talking about.

These things do not logically connect. Do you have any proof of this assertion, that is, that 'gender as a social construct' doctrinally leads to 'rape for the sake of dominating' in third-wave feminism, a creed notorious for its myriad different takes on the matter? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Also, the idea that rape is based around power and domination dates back to the second wave of feminism, as it is critical to Susan Brownmiller's 1975 study of rape throughout history and today, Against Our Will. And considering that the vast majority of rapes (marital and acquaintance rape) occur generally because the rapist feels entitled to sex with his victim, it seems ludicrous to think that dominance and power have nothing to do with those kinds of rape. In addition, many stranger rapes are conducted by a rapist who wishes to exert dominance and power over his victim, whether to "punish" them for transgressions, to showcase his own power, or because the rapist is sexually aroused by hurting and humiliating other people, according to Nicholas Groth's 1979 study of rape. These are, of course, for rape of adults- Groth classifies child molesters into their own category with two subcategories.

Also-also, social construction of gender dates back chronologically to the first wave of feminism, most famously with Margaret Mead's
study of the people of the Chambri Lake region of New Guinea, recorded in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), which led her to conclude that gender roles were socially constructed, and at the time, gender and gender roles were seen as inseparable. However, the idea first came through the science of anthropology, rather than through some sort of nefarious feminist conspiracy.

In short, Lagmonster, your beliefs are based on factual inaccuracies. You may want to revisit them in light of that.

[Lagmonster]

From their own lips. I neglected to post those links in my initial comment because I had assumed they are common knowledge.

Absolutely a couple of dangerous people, yes, and I hadn't heard about them. I don't question that the ranks of republicans include swaths of misogynists, but I did give them the credit that they wouldn't let those people be their spokesmen. Normally, when someone talks about their ideological enemy as if they were one mustache short of a Hitler, you get the idea that they're just making sure that their effigy is properly flammable. Kudos on producing real-life Neanderthals.

I think the disconnect came because I am looking at the broader swath that make up the anti-abortion crowd, like the conservative acquaintances I mentioned before who see the legislation as an inconvenience that saves human lives, and you are looking at what I hope is the much narrower segment within that crowd who are plainly woman-hating assholes.

I'm not speaking for myself. My wife and many other women I have spoken to voiced the opinion themselves. She used to work with rape victims for the Sexual Assault Response Service (and many of her current clients are rape vicitims, since she deals with the mentally ill). It does not require that every victim relive the experience for it to be rape. Some will not object strenuously if it means they get the procedure. Some will be unnecessarily traumatized, though. That is the point: to make it traumatic so that they change their minds. Rape as a form of social control.

Your wife should speak for herself; everyone should, that's what I keep saying. I would feel better if you said you'd thought it through carefully before concluding that we need to protect a class of adults for their own good, or because you know how they are actually feeling. I obviously subscribe to the whole 'The paving job on this section of the Hellbound Expressway is brought to you by Good Intentions, Inc.' theory.

As to what to call the procedure itself, I very clearly said that I support any woman who says, "I was raped by my doctor/the state", but I would disagree with her if she then said, "This is also rape if it happens to you". And I wouldn't disagree that this was a form of social control. It's just not simple.

You may write that off as more feminist theorizing, but it seems obviously implicit in the choice of words used by legislators. Why should anyone, anyone, be made to go through with an unnecessary procedure whose sole purpose is to make one uncomfortable?

Bakustra pointed out in the post above that I have the wrong term for the ideological group whose ideas I think are bullshit, but that's just embarrassing, and not actually important to a discussion of those ideas, and I'll get into that when I get around to replying to his post. As to your second question, an unnecessary medical procedure qualifies as abuse, and nobody should be made to go through with it. I'm not sure if you were implying that I thought they should, or just asking the question rhetorically, but I'm going to assume the better of you.

[Terralthra]

Lagmonster, any response to my post regarding transabdominal v. transvaginal ultrasound?