Divinest Sense

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.

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I should confess that I’ve always been more of an observer than a participant in Texas Womanhood: the spirit was willing but I was declared ineligible on grounds of size early. You can’t be six feet tall and cute, both. I think I was first named captain of the basketball team when I was four and that’s what I’ve been ever since.

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I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point — race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

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The problem with those who choose received Authority over fact and logic is how they choose which part of Authority to obey. The Bible famously contradicts itself at many points (I have never understood why any Christian would choose the Old Testament over the New), and the Koran can be read as a wonderfully compassionate and humanistic document. Which suggests that the problem of fundamentalism lies not with authority, but with ourselves.

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I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

–Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

The Dixie Chicks’ latest album is topping the Billboard country music chart, which is based on album sales. I’m so proud of my homegirls, who have succeeded based on their enormous talent and original sound, despite the fact that they’ve been frozen out by the country music scene. Other country artists frequently poke fun at them, and country radio stations refuse to play their hits, all because Natalie Maines spoke her mind and said what we were all thinking. Well, guess who has the last laugh? Here’s to the women who single-handedly made country music interesting and relevant again.

South Dakota passed a law making almost all abortions illegal in that state. The law is designed to be sent up to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe. You will see a lot more states ramping up their anti-choice legislation in the coming weeks and months - not only in hopes of accelerating a direct challenge to Roe, but to have state laws banning abortion already in place when Roe is overturned. Overturning the landmark decision won’t make abortion illegal, but will allow the separate states to legislate it however they please. And the states - mainly the ones containing the poorest Americans - are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of making reasonable healthcare for women officially against the law. It’s already next to impossible for women to get an abortion in some states, with the barriers that have successfully been put into place.

Thank goodness I live in Maryland. I feel like I should be driving south and picking up women, and bringing them here for safe and legal abortions. Is there some kind of undergound railroad yet? There has to be.

We can’t give up yet, though. Even though we face seemingly unsurmountable barriers in all three branches of our government, we have to keep fighting and educating. There is still not an anti-choice majority on the court. So far. And I believe that there is enough of a majority among the American public supporting safe and legal abortion that the outcry will be deafening if any attempts are made on Roe.

I got an e-mail from NARAL a couple of weeks ago entitled “Birth control: something we can all agree on.” OK, that may be true, but the e-mail looks like a big white flag to me. I’m sorry, NARAL, you have “abortion rights” in your name, so you had better think real hard about what you’re doing. This is not the time to give up and go for the next best thing.

It is hard to describe the white-hot rage that consumed me, body and soul, this morning as I sat in heavy traffic, streets clogged with the cars of innocent commuters trying to navigate those last few blocks to the office amidst throngs of snotty young people with anti-choice signs and placards. All dressed alike in blue caps and lily-white skin, huddled like little flocks of sheep around the giant buses that decided to park in the middle of E street to drop them off.

Pretty much all DC protests arouse some ire in me when they decide to organize in the middle of my commute. But these ridiculous brainwashed morons bussed in from mega-churches all over the eastern U.S. were too contemptible for me to handle without busting a vein in my neck. I think what upsets me the most about this particular Jesus-freak love-in is the way that the churches brazenly explot their young people for the purpose of making a cheap political play. It’s easy to get a bunch of teenagers on a bus to go do something stupid. I mean, what could be more awesome than a bus trip out of town with all the other cool kids? This is how I got suckered into attending that morally blurry Steven Curtis Chapman concert at the age of 14. They even got me to wear a T-Shirt that said “get right, or get left….behind!” Listening to a couple hours of contemporary christian drivel seemed like a small price to pay to hang out with my friends at a concert downtown, plus we got to go out for mexican food afterward.

That what is so sad. Those pompous teenagers with their hats and signs are having lots of fun in DC today, but a few years down the road they are going to look back with morbid embarrassment - and sharp pangs of regret - once they realize that they contributed, in their own little way, to the curtailment of a human right and an essential public health service. They will hide their heads in shame when they realize that they have killed more people than they have saved, and caused more misery to BORN children than they ever imagined possible.

SusanG addresses part of my anger:

I’m just trying to tune in to the logic here of this fetishization of the fetus, this cult of the blastula. As far as I can tell, the “reasoning” must go something like this: Embryos are innocent and sinless, unlike the rest of humankind, therefore God commands that they are somehow deserving of treatment as a special class (although it’s hard to justify the God-induced early miscarriage rate under this argument … but never mind). But watch out, kiddo. Once you draw that first lungful of breath, sin must get sucked into your lungs like a couple gallons of evil in sick building syndrome, because … Baby, you are on your own. Yeah, you and your mama too, if she’s not of the right economic class. No child care, crappy and undersubsidized health care, no Head Start, no school lunches, no student aid to dig your sorry ass out of the mess you were born into, no federal job training if the conservatives continue their slash and burn budget cuts (but you can join the military, babe). Once you draw that first fateful breath, you’re just as worthless as the rest of us … and part of the growing legion of the discarded, shamed, blamed and forgotten, tossed into the dark corners of our “free” society. Crawl your own way out of the ditch the compassionate conservatives dug for you. Little infants who respirate, be on notice: You are the embarrassing debris left over from the American dream. Get used to it.

The question is exactly how. By what process, exactly, will our rights be taken away from us? In one fell swoop, where Roe is overturned and such matters are left to the states to decide? Or in a series of seemingly innocuous, but ultimately devastating, supreme court decisions? I can’t wait to find out! I can’t wait to see our brave democratic legislators fawning over Scalito and mumbling about how he’s one of the great minds of our time. I can’t wait to see the unbridled glee on the faces of those few but loud white “religious” men when they declare the War on Women over, mission accomplished. Because it will happen, and it will make them more powerful than we ever knew they could be.

Having just joined the iPod world with my new video-capable toy, I decided (all on my own initative!) to check out this “podcasting” (and the nascent “vodcasting”) to see what all the hype was about.

Well, there’s a whole lot of crap out there, just like everywhere else, but there are some really fun ones. I enjoy the music enthusiasts who drag old stuff out of the vault, dorktones being my current favorite. Then there are all the tech tidbits, funny stuff, treatises on the digital divide, news about outer space, documentary footage of life in Tuscany… lots of fun and educational things to waste time on the subway with.

Today I read this article in Wired online about how there are no women in podcasting. Although the piece starts off by citing an incident of sexist rudeness at a podcasting event, the tone subtly changes to shift the blame onto the women. Women just aren’t doing anything interesting. The only successful female-authored podcast is one about yuppie childrearing. Women aren’t interested in technology, and have to be dragged into it by their husbands. Women just aren’t making themselves heard.

Bullshit. This is no different from my visit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts here in DC, which features lots of interesting artwork from women whose husbands were famous artists. Don’t tell me that women just weren’t interested in making art. And of course there is the recurring lament of “where are all the women bloggers?” The female podcasters can’t be found because nobody in the boys club is looking for them. Nobody told them there was a convention. Journalists only give press time to the “most popular” podcasters, according to…. the male network of podcasters. Yawn. Same ol’ same ol’.

Wired Magazine kind of pisses me off anyway. It’s written in the same sort of pandering illiterate boy-speak that one finds in Maxim or Stuff and the graphics look like a flyer for an extreeeeeme whatever-boarding contest. A while back there was an issue devoted to the theme of “remix culture”, which could have been interesting, except that it was full of short pointless articles about tired and shallow mashups of various tropes. One article was about messing with famous logos for ironic fun - it featured a t-shirt with the Sex Pistols logo, except it had been changed to “Pistol Sex” and had a gagged and blindfolded woman and a bunch of guns floating around it. There was no caption explaining that one. It’s the kind of thing that could be provocative if painted in large scale and hung on a gallery wall with other logos made violent. But in the context of the article, it was clearly meant to be wearable and funny. Har har har! Pistol sex! I get it!

I’m watching the Sunday talk shows yesterday and Stephanopoulos is interviewing Queen Rania of Jordan about the bombing suspect that they had just captured. George asks:

“whoa, a WOMAN was going to blow herself up - is that some crazy shit or what?”

Rania: Yes, these are very bad people.

George: Yeah, but, a WOMAN?

Rania: uhhhh, I don’t follow…

George: If you had had a chance to sit down with this crazy lady for a heart-to-heart chat before the bombing took place, what would you have said to her to try to talk her out of it?

Rania: Oh, I dunno, George, I guess I would have popped “how Stella Got her Groove Back” into the VCR, got out the kleenexes and chocolates, and just, you know, talked to her, uterus to uterus, about what it means to be a slave to your own hysterics. And then we would have done each other’s nails, and then had “shopping therapy” to cure our silly anger problems. Are you effin’ kidding me? I would have buried that murdering lunatic so deep inside our darkest prison that she would have thought she’d mistakenly climbed up her own asshole. What the fuck do I look like?

OK, I may be paraphrasing a little bit, and she didn’t actually dress him down as she should have - but wouldn’t it have been great if she had? She’s a freaking ruler, not Oprah. *sigh* I’m a little down in the dumps, time for some shopping therapy!

The Guardian waxes commonsensical about the results of a new study by psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde–it demonstrates that there are very few inherent psychological differences between men and women. The different behaviors that we tend to take on are caused mostly by cues we pick up from our environment and inequities in social structure. And boys are not better at math! Some delicious shame-on-you quotes:

A common method was to show that patterns of electro-chemistry in the body or brain were different for men and women, or that various bits of brain had different sizes. That this could be due to differences in upbringing rather than the Y chromosome was rarely considered. Yet it has been clear for some time that nurture affects biology profoundly. Several studies show that women sexually abused as children have 5% less of the brain’s hippocampal region than untraumatised women. Similar evidence regarding the effect of nurture exists for patterns of brainwaves or for crucial hormones such as cortisol.
Little coverage was given to a study of 37 nations that showed that the more a country fosters women’s financial independence, the less they are attracted by rich men. Nor have I noticed coverage of the fact that, although women tend to be twice as likely as men to suffer depression in the Anglo-Saxon (Americanised) world, that difference disappears in much of gender-equal Scandinavia.

The most emailed story in the NY Times today was this one, about Ivy League undergrads who are already planning to become stay-at-home moms. I’m not saying that this is not a valid choice for a parent to make, but the nonchalant and submissive tone of the women interviewed in the article is downright disturbing.

They have totally bought the line that you can’t be a good parent if you have a full-time job. Excuse me, but my father is a lawyer, and I didn’t get to see him that much when I was a small child because of his late hours and business trips. But do I feel alienated from him? How could I? He was an amazing parent. When he was at home, he spent his time with me and my brother, rocking us to sleep, reading to us, taking us with him to the hardware store and the library, and teaching us about the world.

But my mom was a stay-at-home mom, maybe that’s the reason I turned out so charming, intelligent, and well-adjusted. (and, might I add, good-looking.) She was a wonderful mom, this is true. And it was nice to have her around. But I was put in nursery school pretty early, and I mostly remember spending my time there, which was great fun. Even when I got home, I was *busy* - I had imaginary worlds whose stuffed-animal populations needed tending. New books from the library to devour. The family cat to antagonize. I had a schedule. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with my mom, because she was busy too.

Sometimes my parents would go out for the night, and we’d have a babysitter. At church, there was the nursery lady (who taught me words in Spanish) and at school, there were attentive and friendly teachers. I never confused any of these people with my parents. Mom and dad are always mom and dad, even if you hardly ever see them.

The point is, it takes a village… ok, I won’t go there. But it’s true - a lot of people have a role in raising your child. And children are pretty durn smart about figuring out those roles. They’re not going to turn out all weird in the head because mom works during the day.

The ivy league women in this article seem to me like they’re from some other planet. Maybe they’re all members of the college republicans or something. Because to me, education is not about getting a “well-bred” seal of approval and meeting a future lawyer husband. Education instills a sense of longing–a growing awareness of the vastness of our world and the variety and richness of human experience. Education reminds you of how much you still don’t know, and makes your heart and mind ache to learn more. One way to keep learning is by doing - by working. By participating in society and contributing to it. If I were a mom, I’d want to pass that yearning on to my child, and show her that as many books and furry animals and dandelions as there are at home, there are infinitely more and greater things, out there, out in the world.