To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax)on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. [HuffPo]

Ha-ho! Janet Howell! You go girl! Honorary Blamer of the Week!

Tragically, Howell’s amendment was rejected by 3 votes, and the senate went on to give the nod to the fucking misogynist mandatory ultrasound bill. It’s always the way.

But anyway, inspired by Howell’s Do-It-To-The-Men-Instead initiative, blamer Incognotter sent Spinster HQ a nice email expanding on the Do-It-To-The-Men-Instead theme (one of my favorite themes). She says:

I am beginning to think we are fighting for reproductive rights in the wrong way. If the point is to have big-government interventionism that negates bodily sovereignty as a “solution” to a perceived moral problem, then we should neuter all men at puberty and bank their sperm. It could be used consensually for the purpose of reproduction. No more abortion issues, no more birth control issues, much less war on women. If they had to face that they might suddenly reconsider this big invasive bullshit. Can you imagine the reaction to the realization that a woman had to sign her consent to get knocked up?

The caliber of blaming exhibited here is impressive. Neuter all the dudes! It hits the blaming trifecta: elegant, just, and diabolical! Unwanted pregnancies? Gone, daddy, gone! Abortion? Obsolete! Ghastly “Teen Mom” reality shows on the Aberrant Human Behavior Channel? Cancelled! Babies in trash cans? A thing of the past! Compulsory pregnancy as punishment for slutty behavior? Over! Stuck having to make do with the inferior sperm of your partner? Done!

Imagine the shitstorm if one were to take this — merely as a thought experiment — to the Internet for dude review. Ludicrous! Inhuman! Man-hating! Unnatural! Sacreligious! You castrating bitch! I hope you die in a rape fire, feminazi!

All the while women are in actuality expected to endure much higher and more toxic levels of state intervention simply as a consequence of being female.

This glaring double standard should be all the proof you need that men hate you. If you want to know whether Virginia State Senator Jill Vogel hates you, well, she’s the original sponsor of her state’s rape-the-abortion-seekers bill, so you decide.

On a final note, I must point out that Spinster HQ is fundamentally opposed to human reproduction of any kind. But it is a frustrating reality that reproduction is widely regarded as a “right,” or at least some sort of godly duty, despite the undisputed fact that current human population levels are unsustainable. So as long as they’re gonna do it anyway, and as long as the state is gonna interfere with it wherever it can, it might as well place as much of the burden on men as possible, if for no other reason than an elegant poetic justice/reparations for past abuses combo.

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1. MO State House: “Women are morons”
2. Spinster aunt too lazy to write essay, posts blamer comment instead
3. North Dakota lege to women: “Murderer!”

Rick Santorum

And apparently Osama bin Laden is still dead.

It’s too bad CBS readers’ prurience extends only to freak accidents and violent mishaps. If only they were more interested in bashing Rick Santorum, because that dude is a fucking racist, homophobic, misogynist knob. No doubt you heard this on NPR the other day:

Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” — CBS News

Santorum seems to think that the only people benefiting from public assistance are those lazy-ass black folks. Uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to check the stats before making super-racist remarks at an Iowa rally (not that facts ever get in the way of tiny hate-filled zealots):

CBS News found that of the people on food stamps in Iowa, only nine percent are black and 84 percent are white.

Of course, guffawing over stupid shit Rick Santorum says is like shooting candy out of the mouths of baby fish in a barrel. This post at Think Progress compiles a list of his Top 10 most outrageous campaign statements. My personal fave: that “abortion exceptions to protect women’s health are ‘phony’.”

Back in 1997, when the partial-birth abortion ban was roiling in Washington, Ellen Goodman noted that the Santorum camp viewed “‘health’ [as] nothing but a loophole for women who would abort a pregnancy to fit into a prom dress.” Either he thinks life-threatening pregnancies are just a figment of the Feminazi imagination, or women’s lives are of such little significance that sacrificing them for fetuses is entirely consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Either way, I can’t think of anyone more deserving of his frothy Google reputation.

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Photo of Osammy: AP

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1. Fuck Obama, fetus brown-noser
2. Same stupak, different day
3. North Dakota lege to women: “Murderer!”

I know it is a bizarro-universe because I am typing the following words:

Let us mark with a glad cry the defeat of Initiative 26, the depraved attempt by delusional godbags in Mississippi — the most delusionally godbaggy state in the US — to confer “personhood” on fertilized human eggs. Hah-yee ip-ip! A heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod of appreciation goes out from Spinster HQ to everyone who worked on the successful campaign to smush that extremely crappy amendment.

I have to say, zygote worship truly is one of the freakier manifestations of modern fundamentalist misogyny. Here is a zygote (magnification 2.73 bajillion):

Zygote: Suck it, human host! I rule and you're Number 2!

How could the Lard love that dumb thing more than, for example, me?

Spinster aunt hails a TARDIS.

As you know, whenever people go around recognizing odd bits of reproductive matter as “persons,” they simultaneously un-recognize women as persons, ceding ownership of women’s personal internal organs to the state and instituting a programme of compulsory pregnancy. If Initiative 26 had passed, those two cells up there would actually have more human rights than an actual human woman. For instance, unlike actual women, the state wouldn’t be able to dictate to the cells what they could or couldn’t do with their personal organelles. The state probably doesn’t even know what organelles are. Furthermore, zygotes would enjoy state-mandated free room and board at their human host’s expense. They wouldn’t even have to pay for cable.

But the lives of actual human women would remain subject to the whim of the Jesus-sucking mob. Raped at 14 by your mother’s meth-head boyfriend? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Got cancer and need chemo and radiation? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Aren’t feelin’ it with the compulsory pregnancy dealio, like it might be somewhat discrepant from your goal to win the Tricorder X Prize? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term! And you’d better be a good mother once it’s born — so no getting depressed, no having a glass of wine to dull the crushing pain of your hijacked life, no having any time to yourself — or we’ll put you on the evening news and throw the kid in foster care with pedophiles.

Another point on the depraved misogyny continuum is this shit in Saudi Arabia, where it is a flippin headline when a woman drives a flippin car. Saudi women, as you know, are banned from driving. Apparently if they jaunt around town behind the wheel they become sin-magnets who give God brain tumors. In Saudi Arabia, women never reach the age of majority. They are, their whole lives, wholly owned subsidiaries of male dudes, and can’t do anything without dudely permission.

So the other day some 29 Saudi women got fed up with this program. They took to the open road and drove to the grocery store. This act of defiance unleashed quite the furor.

An anti-driving group on Facebook has called on “real men” to beat up women who drive. On Twitter, activists were called “westernised whores.” Washington Post

Dudes on the Internet: so classy the world over.

Considering that last September a woman who got busted for driving while female was sentenced to 10 lashes by some Muslim putzwad whose deity is also a total loser, these 29 rogue drivers also get a heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod from Spinster HQ. May the day soon arrive when they can fire their hated chauffeurs.

(As a westernised whore, I personally think having a chauffeur would be awesome, but à chacun son gôut.)

Related posts:

1. State senator claims ownership of Nebraska uteruses
2. Spinster aunt reads a couple of GoogleAlerts
3. GOP: “Let us bravely endure the deaths of impregnated women who can’t afford non-misogynist healthcare.”

“Victims of human trafficking are often forced into prostitution and other crimes against their own will, and too many of them are being prosecuted as criminals,” Rep. Yarbrough said. “When we have evidence that involuntary human trafficking was the cause of the crime, even though the victim may not have had the ability or representation to prove it during trial, we must do the right thing and reverse their conviction so they can move on with repairing their lives.” [cite]

What tha? This sounds almost reasonable. I must have woken up in a utopian alternate universe where little bones of compassion are occasionally thrown to the oppressed.

Wait, nope, scratch that. No utopia here. The fashion industry, for example, still exists, as I see from the 1537 emails I’ve gotten about young Thylane Blondeau, the pornulated 10-year-old French model whose sexy Vogue photo spreads are flippin icky.

Her mother must be a terrible person! is the refrain.

Well, perhaps Maman has neglected, like everyone else on the fucking planet, to engage in a little critical thinking concerning the nature of pornography and its role in women’s oppression, but she is not the main asshole here. The main asshole is the global pornsick appetite for the sexification of female persons. If there wasn’t an insatiable audience for preteen sexbots, there wouldn’t be any preteen sexbots.

It’s true that Ms Blondeau cannot actually give meaningful consent allowing the commodification of her body, and that this is outrageous. However, it’s not outrageous merely because she’s only 10 years old. Her mother can’t give meaningful consent, either. In a patriarchy, meaningful consent is not an option for any member of the sex class. Sex is a commodity, and women are sex, so Ms Blondeau’s commodification is entirely consistent is the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Even if her parents weren’t pimping her out, she’d still be fucked.

Why?

She’s a girl in a patriarchy.

After feminist revolt, consent will not be an issue, because there will be no commodification in the first place.

Which is a big part of why dudes hate feminists. Holy shit, we want to take away their porn!

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Take Michele Bachmann. She hates gays and fluorescent light, and loves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy, but has no qualms whatsoever about enjoying an influential, self-determined career outside the home as she flits about the political sphere.* It’s almost as though she fancies herself a liberated woman with some personal agency. She has used the feminist springboard to swan-dive into prominence, from which spot she can proceed to gay-bash, suck up to Dude Nation, and demand constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion.

Now one hears all this absurd murmuring about Bachmann (and her creepy godmother Sarah Palin) having turned themselves officially into something called “evangelical feminists.”

You know, like Jews for Jesus, or Baby Seals for Canadian Seal Clubbers.

Apparently there really is a movement of evangelical feminists, and they’re cheesed. They appear to actually grasp the idea that women are human, so they’re voting Bachmann and Palin off their island (Women Who Ignore Biblical Misogyny Island. It’s a about a thousand nautical miles south of Savage Death Island).

“This application of the term ["evangelical feminist" to Bachmann and Palin] twists the meaning of both “evangelical” and “feminism.” It equates “evangelical” with a far right political ideology rather than its historic definition. And it equates “feminism” simply with a woman’s running for public office even though she may deny full equality and autonomy for women in other areas of life. — Letha Dawson Scanzoni, founding mother of the Biblical feminist movement

Meanwhile, actual feminism continues to gasp for breath as it gets simultaneously coopted, beaten with fundie clubs, and redefined as antifeminism by various assholes. For example, the quotation above came from this blog called Religion Dispatches, where blogger Julie Ingersoll also hipped me to the existence of Smart Girl Summit 2011.**

Smart Girl Summit 2011 will feature arch-misogynist Phyllis Schlafly, who will address “girls” (actually women, but calling them girls reassures everyone of the actual status of female adults) on the subject of how feminism threatens to destroy all life on Earth. Smart Girl Politics is an antifeminist 501(c) dedicated to nurturing misogyny in nascent conservatives by “empowering” them to “fight like a girl” for their right to cram patriarchal mores down everybody’s throat.

Uh oh. This essay had a point, but I’ve forgotten what it was, and now I gotta go to work, so I guess I’ll just leave it here flapping in the breeze. Pointless, breeze-flappin’ essays; they’re what separate the spinster aunt hacks from the responsible journalists who are paid by employers to write professional, polished, unbiased pieces on Justin Bieber or health care reform.

_______________________
* When feminist women buck the hausfrau system, it’s a different story; Bachmann’s evangelical brethren view it as “a satanic attack on the [American family].”

** How fucking patronizing is that name, “Smart Girl Summit”? Can you even imagine a conservative political action group holding a Smart Boy Summit for adult men? To teach them how to fight like a girl? Haw!

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Why is he walking? Because the victim of his assault apparently lied on some old tax forms and employment applications. In the United States of America, it is settled fact that women who lie on old tax forms and employment applications cannot legally be raped as long as the rapist is rich and famous enough. Pronging such women in New York hotels, as well dislocating their shoulders and hitting them in the face, is an old white dude’s right. Luckily for American justice, a handy old dirtbag French politician happened to be on the spot when this particular woman needed her punitive yet “consensual” pronging, which was so “consensual” that the dirtbag felt compelled to try to flee the country immediately upon completion of his Great Seducering.

I am disgusted that the DA’s office is letting this slide, but, dammit, not surprised.

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No need to limit yourself to Bachmann, though. Go wild. Be delightful. Eschew ellipses. I’ll catch you on the flip-flop.

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Let us pause for a moment to let that sink in.*

The degree to which motherhood is reviled in our culture is generally unappreciated, thanks to cloaking devices like Mother’s Day and other patronizing practices and sentimental narratives. Putting Mother on a pedestal effectively disguises society’s contempt for her. But beneath the glib and oily layer of saccharine lip-service is an abiding sense of mother’s worthlessness except as a self-sacrificing incubator of domination culture.

Mother’s sacred duty is twofold: give birth, then imbue the offspring with the mores required to replicate patriarchy. She must perform this selfless low-status duty at all costs, including, apparently, that of her own life.

Women who fail to become mothers, as well as mothers who fuck up and deviate from the impossible standards mandated by the official patriarchal narrative,** are always punished in one way or another. With this anti-abortion bill dealio, unless she is fortunate enough to be ill in a hospital that does not receive federal funding, a woman who is insufficiently robust to carry a fetus to term may be punished by death. Just like that.

Mother’s function appears to be child-centric, but in actuality it serves domination culture at the expense of her children. As feminist analysis has shown, society has only two uses for human progeny: as pawns in the ongoing effort to control women, and as drones forced to absorb patriarchal messages that mold them into the obedient adult proles necessary to further the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy.

Fetushood is romanticized by godbags and misogynists, but as we have seen time and again, no real concern for the fetus’ well-being obtains after birth. We know this because what happens after birth is childhood, a hood that can only be described as ghastly. Any personhood conferred upon the former fetus is null and void as soon as it becomes a baby. Childhood is nostalgified by adults who perhaps recollect gaps in their own oppression training, when some little spark of joy might have erupted for a moment or two. However, because children are not recognized as fully human, and are in fact routinely abused and oppressed by nearly every adult who crosses their path, actual childhood is, at best, overwhelmingly a painful period of indoctrination, and at worst, a violent nightmare.

But back to motherhood. Crap like this “Protect Life Act” — named by one of those congressional aides who majored in Doublespeak at Dickhead & Prick University — is useful in exposing mother-hate that is normally hidden. The general public may be unaware, but it is codified in the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, in the Dutiful Mother Provisions, that a woman’s essence consists of her uterus and the contents therein. This clause allows assholes like pink-faced, woman-hating bill sponsor Joe Pitts to seek retribution when a woman exhibits reproductive nonconformity, such as getting sick. Whereupon it naturally follows that hospital personnel may, at their whim, elect to kill an impregnated human rather than disturb any genetic material attached to her personal person.

_____________________
* Let us also pause to consider that, on top of every other level of wrong, this bill is just plain crazy. If an impregnated woman dies, so will the fetus, right? If the fetus is gonna die anyway, letting the woman die when an abortion will save her life is nothing but fuckin godbag politics.

** That is, all women.

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You could have knocked me and Phil, my secretary, over with a feather when we heard some guy on the radio freak out about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It was the fact of the repeal, not the radio guy freakout (“we’re gambling with our national security over political correctness!”), that made us stop what we were doing (it was Saturday, so we were lookin’ at turkeys) and cock an attentive ear.

“Damn,” said Phil. “Didn’t see that comin’.”

It’s just so uncharacteristically progressive of the Central Junta to take such a wild plunge and throw its tacit approval behind the whimsical notion that homos are somewhat human enough to join the warrior class. So uncharacteristically progressive is this plunge that my suspicions are 99.7% confirmed: There’s been a breach in the spacetime warpmatter horizon-continuum.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that a famous non-heterosexual spinster aunt from the future, Holly Clitoris, recently came back through a dark energy vortex-hole. She bought a bean-and-cheese with guacamole at a taco stand in South Austin, which set off a chain of events that altered our old universe into the kind of universe in which social policy reflects the idea that gays should sometimes be mistaken for people.

In Holly Clitoris’ time, being gay is such a non-event that “gay culture” is just culture, and straight people only have one TV channel.

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This post would have appeared earlier, but I only just now got the gore and debris cleaned up. I allude to the obstreperal lobe tissue dripping from the bunkhouse rafters. That’s right, I blew another lobe, and no doubt you did, too, when you heard about the insane bill that just passed in Missouri.

Missouri’s state legislature, like that of many states, has invaded the personal bodies of its citizenry and enslaved their uteruses. Without compunction of any kind, this cruel and bloated governing body swaggers around the countryside, snapping its fingers, yelling “jump,” and smirking when the captive uteruses ask “how high?”.

There was already an extremely obnoxious law in Missouri forcing women seeking abortions — 24 hours in advance of the procedure — to sit through a lecture (bring a book) on the supposed mental and physical devastation that abortions supposedly cause. The idea being that, after a heartstring-tugging indoctrination with patriarchy-replicating, godsick disinformation about the certainty of a post-abortion lifetime of regret, cancer, depression, infertility, desperate yearning and insanity, women would voluntarily abdicate their personal bodily sovereignty in order to incubate fetuses for the state, which state would then abandon all parties concerned at the conclusion of gestation.

So things were bad enough in Missouri before, but with this new law they’re even worse. Instead of being forced to endure this patronizing abortion-is-bad-for-you crap via telephone, women are now required to audit in person. Providers must also describe the adorable little fingers and toes, the teensy little heartbeat, the precious little turned-up nose of the “unborn child.” Then they have to offer the woman an ultrasound and a chance to hear for herself how adorable the teensy heartbeat is. Then — no shit — they have to hand over “a state-produced brochure proclaiming: ‘The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.’” If the woman is pretty young, they have to show her a couple of seasons’ worth of “Gilmore Girls,” because that’s such a realistic portrayal of the long-term results of teen pregnancy. Then they lock her in a room for an hour or two with a statue of the Blessed Virgin who weeps tears of blood.

This in-person ‘consultation’ means double the trips to the clinic, more time off the job, and, in the case of women who have to travel for their procedures (that is, everyone in Missouri who doesn’t live in Kansas City, Columbia, or the CWE), the time and expense of putting up in a Motel 6 and eating Grand Slam Fried Polyester Combos at Denny’s while they do their 24-hour stretch of state-mandated limbo. In other words, it merely throws more asinine obstacles in the path of any Missouri citizen who wishes to exercise her fucking legal right to an abortion. Not to mention her human right to personal autonomy.

As far as I know, there is no collateral provision in the law requiring abortion providers to detail the risks inherent in not terminating an unwanted pregnancy. For example, which women are most likely to be murdered? Pregnant women, that’s who! Neither is there a requirement that women be apprised of other unpleasant pregnancy-related crap, such as the public monitoring of their personal habits (no smoking! no drinking!); the insipid, infantilizing culture of American “moms-to-be”; life-threatening conditions such as preeclampsia and postpartum depression; 18 years of financial hardship; 18 years of unpaid domestic labor; empty-nest syndrome; and, naturally, the deleterious impact of human reproduction on the environment. Not to mention that women who don’t have children are free from a lifetime of public shaming for their bad mothering skills and from having to incorporate the word “piddle” into their vocabulary. You’d think that people might find all that information at least as useful as the “fact” that parasitic clumps of cells are Jesus’s Mini-Me. But the State of Missouri couldn’t give a flip about actual facts.

It’s just another dastardly case of institutionalized misogyny and oppression disguised as a romantic fascination with adorable fetuses. I puke on the Missouri state legislature. “The life of each human being begins with conception?” Shoot me now. Every time a politician utters this meaningless godsick hate speech he lands another kick in the teeth of Truth and Beauty’s rotting corpse.

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2. MO State House: “Women are morons”
3. North Dakota lege to women: “Murderer!”