I Blame The Patriarchy

Grinning moron hates wife

Jill — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:15:35 +0000

Patriarchy-blaming is a crappy business. The Internet feminist must beware the fine line, or slippery slope, or pot-calling-kettle-black, or hoist-on-own-petard or what have you, when aiming the Super Spinster Truth-Ray at stuff. Attention must be paid to the potential stinkiness of one’s own role in the proceeding. Care must be taken to inspect the fists for ham. Sometimes, denouncing a particular instance of exploitation produces unwanted side-effects. Ethical concerns. Knots in the lobe. Sensations of inner grubbiness. Such that, when the denunciation is completed and the sun sets on another day of blaming, instead of writing, with the usual glowing satisfaction, “Dear Diary, today I exposed some pernicious culture-of-oppression shit for what it is, goddammit!” one is obliged to say “Crap, I think I just participated in misogyny most foul.”

The blaming goal is to expose oppression without compounding it with one’s own voyeurism, but this can be pretty difficult when dealing with subject matter that is by definition dependent upon — and therefore inherently sensitive to — the public gaze. I allude, of course, to the subject-victims of pornography. How do you write, “Here is a graphic representation of our culture’s hatred of women, and this is why I think so” without re-injuring the victim during the course of your argument? Is the pornulated woman to be made a casualty of feminist analysis in addition to her primary violation? Is a woman, once pornulated, swept away into some skeezy two-dimensional purgatory to remain there forever?

These issues are looming large down at Spinster HQ at the moment, and have been ever since that dangole chump PhysioProf hipped me to the existence of an extremely disturbing website. Maybe you’ve already seen it? It’s the “crying wife” website. In summary: asshole tapes wife when she cries piteously at movies, asshole mocks and laughs at tearful wife, asshole puts videos on YouTube, asshole’s website becomes popular. It’s not pornography in the fetishy sex-smut tradition, but it is definitely the graphic representation of dudely woman-hatin’.

Just Google “crying wife.” It’s the first result.

Not realizing what I was in for, I watched one of the many videos. In this video the woman reacts to the ending of “Star Wars.” I do not exaggerate when I say that it caused my jaw to hang open quite a bit further than usual. Also, my eyes started twitching, and I experienced the nasty sensation of self-loathing that I suspect must afflict all losers when they do loser-y shit.

The woman becomes weirdly and inconsolably emotional, yeah, but my slackjaw was occasioned not by her piteous, painful sobbing, but by her grinning asshole husband goading her on. That’s right, when she actually stops sobbing, he intentionally re-exacerbates her sadness by inviting her to remember sad scenes in the film. He also makes a big fucking point of saying that it is so hilarious to pimp her on the Internet as she experiences this extended moment of private weirdness and acute vulnerability. His tone as videographer can be summarized as “I invite you to point and laugh as I proudly make the lovable simpleton I’m married to cry and cry over stupid shit.”

As PhysioProf wrote in his email, “the sheer gratuitous pointlessness of the cruelty is shocking.”

The husband-dude’s laffy obliviousness adds a whole nother layer of crapulence, but it’s obvious he knows on some level that he’s exploiting her, because he’s got a whole FAQ dedicated to explaining how he isn’t exploiting her. First he makes a hi-fucking-larious joke about how she’s insane “only 4 days out of the month ;-)” [sic]. Then he makes his argument, which can can be boiled down to three points. One, it isn’t exploitation because he just can’t help laughing at his wife. Two, his wife “thinks it’s funny” and is “able to laugh at herself afterwards.” Three, it isn’t exploitation because he says it isn’t. He “loves [her] to death and thinks she’s the cutest girl in the world!” Also, “She’s a good sport and we all love her :)”.

Well, that makes it okay, then!

I’ve wanted to complain about this for a couple of days, but the idea of my own complicity in propagating the virus and contributing to the sobsploitation has made me queasy. It still does make me queasy. I have attempted to mitigate my quease by omitting to link to the website, but I have to admit that the astonishing degree of misogyny displayed by this loving husband moron has to be seen to be believed.

Spinster aunt smells hoax

Jill — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:47:02 +0000

While whiffling though the NPR website in search of a piece on The New Alpha Wife, which I did not find, my neural net received an even nastier jolt than expected when a story titled “New Zealand Teen Auctions Virginity To Pay Tuition” hove into view.

The story so far: “Unigirl,” an anonymous 19-year-old student advertising on a NZ auction site, supposedly proposes to exchange her “virginity” for what supposedly is the high bid of $30,000.

Since pay-to-rape is perfectly legal in New Zealand (NPR calls the NZ laws governing fair use of prostituted women “liberal,”) it is difficult to imagine why this is news, unless somebody besides the prostituted student stands to make a buck.

Wait, am I seriously suggesting that there is anything more to the story than an empowerfulized gal workin’ the system for an opportunity to go to college? Why yes. Yes I am. From the NZ Herald:

“Unigirl has claimed that more than 30,000 people have viewed her advertisement and more than 1,200 made bids. With those sorts of numbers and with the battle for ratings at seven o’clock heating up, [New Zealand TV3 personality John] Campbell is right to be chasing and questioning the virgin story.

“This is mass audience stuff, and we have to get people to watch us,” Campbell told the newspaper.”

The online auction house, reportedly a fledgling startup, stands to cash in on some free advertising. News outlets like TV3 and NPR stand to cash in on a titillating story about a shameless teen so enterprising, so driven, so sexy, that she’s willing to sacrifice her most precious, priceless asset to the highest bidder in a crass capitalist exchange that will forever sluttify her. News media can take it a bit further, as NPR did, and conceal the paucity of actual news with a rehash of other famous virginity auctions. But because there aren’t all that many of those “feminist experiments,” they can throw in the one about the woman who got busted for offering herself online in exchange for baseball tickets.

In the end, though, whether or not the Unigirl story is true, there’s nothing to see here but the usual smirking, moralizing, and prurient interest that always seems to accompany the high-class prostituted woman narrative. Stories about poor New Zealand women working the streets to support their kids or their drug habits are somewhat fewer and further between. Stories focusing on the men who pay to rape women? Non-existent.

I laugh and laugh about this virginity stuff. Virginity! Ha! Like it’s an actual thing with objective value, and not just an offensive and essentially worthless porno-patriarchocratic concept. I can think of few concepts that are more offensive, really. Because “virginity” is predicated on the notion of active, authoritative annihilation, via the indisputable power of studly peen-pronging, of a passive and oppressed naif’s purported innocence, any dude who would actually “take” it is an instaloser, a rapist, and a creep.

But come on, let’s face it; the whole story has to be bogus, because any dude living outside a Victorian porn fantasy who could afford $30 large for a single, hypothetical hymen is rich enough that he could totally get the same thing for free any day of the week.

Still Life with Shatner Bobblehead and Duct Tape

Jill — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:54:47 +0000

Oh, no.

In the picturesque Texas Hill Country, where for 2 years it did nothing but not rain, it now does nothing but rain.

Remember that Ray Bradbury story where the kid lives on a planet where it only stops raining for like 10 minutes once every 80 years or whatever, and everybody looks forward to it like mad, but the kid, whose only dream is to frolic outside unmolested by condensed atmospheric moisture, is accidentally locked in a closet by feckless playmates and misses the golden 10 minutes? It’s like that here at Spinster HQ. And, if I may say so, what the fuck? I turn my gaze skyward, hoping to catch an errant rose-gold ray of sun so that my lobe might convert it into obstreperantin or chortletic acid, but no. The sky’s just a vast expanse of dirty white wetness and it’s screwing sorely with my neurotransmitters. About the only ones left in my lobe are depressulose and stupenephrine. My yippee receptors are just flappin’ in the breeze, flappin’ in the breeze.

Maybe all this water wouldn’t be so bad if I were a newt, but a newt I’m not.

I’ve been told that the rain stops occasionally. Having been driven mad by the incessant tappa-tappa on the window pane-a, I am dubious in the extreme that this is the case, but if it is true, for the lovagod call my ass up when it happens, so I can biff out to the nearest field and do the butt-dance without having to put on that clammy rubber hula skirt.

It goes without saying that cabin fever has begun to manifest itself in the shape of TV viewing. Here are some of the repellent results of this pursuit.

1. A television commercial advertising a vitamin pill called Centrum Ultra Men’s asserts that some things are made just for men. According to the commercial, three of those things, besides, presumably, Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills, are:

• bobbleheads

• duct tape

• a third thing I can’t remember

I’m calling bullshit on Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills. I have in my possession one bobblehead and four rolls of duct tape, of which fact I provide photographic evidence above. I submit that the gender binary narrative supported by Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills is bogus, dated, and sexist. Obviously bobbleheads and duct tape are not made just for men, but for anyone who needs a bobblehead, or who has to tape shit together.

Take me, for example. Like most women, bobbleheads and duct tape are integral to my daily routine. In fact, when checking the Spinster Agenda this morning, just after “Pump Iron, Get Ripped” and just before “Corrupt the Youth of Today” I observed these items: “apply ducktape to blown-out sole on paddock boot” and “tabulate preliminary results of Shatner bobblehead/Cheez-Whiz experiment.”

2. Another instance of sexism on television what recently caught mine eye was a promo for a show on ~~Comedy~~ Misogyny Central called “Tosh.0″. In this promo, Tosh.0, a loud, 20-something duuude — or perhaps he is a bobblehead — hilariously and edgily tantalizes his teen male audience with a segment that promises to answer the burning question “can women parallel park?” Cut to footage of a car backing up crazily onto a sidewalk. Women, avers Tosh.0, can absolutely not parallel park! Watch his show! Because denigrating women with moth-eaten sexist stereotypes is freakin awesome!

By some sad coincidence, I was using the Internet this morning, and just happened to come across the very segment Tosh.0 was promoting in his commercial. The video does, I regret to say, entirely live up to the extremely diminished expectations I have been forced to adopt regarding Men Aged 18-34. Not only does young Tosh.0 mock a middle-aged woman for being “really old,” he makes racist remarks about “L.A. Asians,” and throws in a few superannuated “jokes” about how women sucker innocent men into relationships, thereby destroying men’s lives.

To recap, this is what passes for funny on a major TV network in 2010: women can’t drive, old women can’t drive, Vietnamese women can’t drive, and women, with their cunning stupidity, live to shatter the dreams of innocent men.

3. I sometimes watch CNN while I’m pumping iron and getting ripped, and believe me, an aunt could write a dissertation, a Broadway play, and several meaningful protest songs on the garish spectacle of patriarchal mores on parade every minute on that network. But I’ll just skip all that and proceed directly to the commercial that irritated me this morning.

A handsome, silver-haired guy tells the camera that even though he did “everything he was supposed to do” as far as fitness and “eating right,” he still had a heart attack. So now he takes aspirin every day.

This ad isn’t explicitly sexist (although when compared with the “feminine” version of the same commercial — middle-aged wife-and-mother is “lucky” her daughter gave her an aspirin during her heart attack — its genderedness is pretty glaring). What particularly chaps the hide is this obnoxious practice of marketing through fear of sudden death cardiac death arrest. Because, wait. You mean I can pump iron and get ripped and eat nothing but raw spinach smoothies and take Centrum Ultra Spinster’s vitamin pills, and I still might croak, unless I get my butt on an “aspirin regimen”? Sign me up!

4. Jesus in a jetpack! Check out the huge fucking green “germs” on that member of someone’s family! It turns out that “hundreds of bacteria” could be on my kitchen hand sanitizer dispenser! I need an electronic motion-sensor model. I’ll mount it on my fence, so that when the feral hogs trot by, it’ll kill 99.9% of their swine flu.

Photo still from Lysol commercial. Note the word “Dramatization” in the lower left corner. Good thing they put that there, because otherwise I’d have been forced to conclude that the wholesome sport of basketball is now being threatened by a race of giant carnivorous paramecia.

Spinster aunt goes to pieces

Jill — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:13:34 +0000

Oh no! A 40-second video of a dancing cartoon butt wreaks havoc with my neurotransmitters!

Below, sent in by blamer Katie — thanks, Katie! — is the video that generated my paroxysm. According to my secretary Phil, the video is funny, but not as funny as I think it is.

There are molecules in the brain called “neurotransmitters”

Jill — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:38:15 +0000

Because of my award-nominated, it-is-highly-unlikely-that-you-are-qualified-to-post-here moderation policy — “Old Iron-Fist” is what they call me down at Spinster HQ — readers of I Blame the Patriarchy aren’t always exposed to mansplaining at standard Internet concentrations. I sometimes wonder if this is really all to the good, since mansplaining can be so goddam hilarious, and who doesn’t enjoy a hearty guffaw after a hard day of gossiping or neurosurgery or trench-digging or whatever it is that you do all day?

But then I come to my senses.

Mansplaining — you know mansplaining, right? It’s that loud, annoying, repetitive alarm call that men emit whenever they perceive a lower-status person challenging their authority — isn’t really so goddam hilarious in and of itself. This is because it is a hallmark of domination culture, because it is comprised primarily of meaningless noise (whether taken in or out of context), and because it is obfuscatory, oppressive, denigrating, sexist, and rude. It can only achieve comic status when openly mocked. Preferably by an angry mob.

My thoughts turned briefly to mansplanation mockery this morning when I found myself deleting a something of a dilly. The author in question was, as is typical, correcting me on this point and that, explaining that my views (but not his) are “sexist,” yadda yadda, in a tone that suggested so deep a reverence for his own intellect that he’d expect the solar system to explode if he failed to execute this very important takedown on my blog. His brilliant denouement? The assertion that if I “honestly” disagree with him — apparently this contingency should be all but impossible — then “what [I] practice isn’t feminism.”

Aww yiah. It’s my very favorite species of mansplaining, the species where some dim bulb with a feeble and unsophisticated grasp of the principles — instead of kissing my ass and begging me brokenly for a few words of enlightenment that might ultimately prevent him from going through life known to the ladies as Chad, the Purulent Lump of Gonorrhea — purports to know — better than the actual feminist — what feminism is or isn’t.

How appropriate that veteran blamer Ron Sullivan should have chosen this point to alert me to an excellent mansplaining-mockery post at Zuska’s entitled “You May Be A Mansplainer If …”. This post is the greatest thing ever published on either this Internet or that one. Zuska invites readers to give examples of, and to ridicule, mansplaining. It’s the angry mob of which I spoke so yearningly just a moment ago! As of this writing there are over 200 comments. Like this one by Zuskateer mightydoll, a classic in the Men Literally Cannot Hear Women Speaking Division.

my ex used to do this:

ex: something’s wrong with my computer.

me: Oh, looks like there’s a phrenicle in the stubert zone

ex: something’s wrong with my computer

me: Why not check the stubert zone for phrenicles?

ex: something’s wrong with my computer – - I’ll ask Dick at work about it.

A WEEK PASSES IN WHICH I MENTION THE STUBERT PHRENICLES A FEW MORE TIMES

ex: Hey, I spoke to Dick at work about my computer. Turns out, (begins speaking really slowly) there are these things called phrenicles which SPEAK … TO… the molydimes. The molydimes can reside in the jiminy zone, or they can reside in the stubert zone, but WHEN they reside in the stubert zone, sometimes there’s a problem with them communicating with the loovarths, so it’s best to keep phrenicles out of the stubert zone. All I have to do is move these phrenicles back to the jiminy zone and it’s solved. Isn’t Dick at work a computer god?

me: …

Or this, from SKM:

You might be a mansplainer if you begin a sentence addressed to a woman whom you know holds a degree in neuroscience with “there are molecules in the brain called neurotransmitters”.

This You May Be A Mansplainer post is not without its bittersweet moments. For instance, there is the introduction into English of the exquisite and apparently Brazilian phrase “rule crapper” ( as in “There, he did it again, he just crapped a rule”), but tragically, the author of this revelatory comment simultaneously mansplains that mansplaining “is not necessarily sexist” because men crap rules at other men all the time.

Even if it happens to dudes, it can still be sexist, yo.

Poop, I just crapped a rule!

Poop!

In fact, quite the buttload of Zuska’s mansplaining commenters are apparently authoritative experts on mansplaining. This is surprising and kind of meta, since it is a well-known fact that men who claim to know what the fuck mansplaining is cannot resist mansplaining that it doesn’t, at least for them, exist. More than a few of them mansplain that theirs is a truly lofty and nuanced apprehension of mansplaining, which is why when they do it they aren’t really doing it, so it isn’t the same as when actual mansplainers mansplain.

Then the outraged feminist shows up with the news that this awful manhating post has — get ready for a shock – made feminism the laughingstock of the whole internet. Oh no.

“Stop helping” is this outraged feminist’s refrain. Women should steer clear of critical analyses of male privilege because it makes us unpopular with the Chads of the world.

This is all outrageous and very maddening!

God, the whole thing is just swell.

Original iPad joke

Jill — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:32:09 +0000

Remember this vid from the Jerktassic Epoch?

Jokes about menstruation are hilarious because menstruation is gross and alluding to it is fucking transgressive.

Spinster aunt begins post with “I,” tells anecdote

Jill — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:18:04 +0000

I recently blew out a lobe laughing a cold, ulcerated laugh. It happened yesterday, when my sibling Tidy told me a sad tale of Christian insanity, which tale I now relate to you, right after I bore you with some background details.

For reasons that, to my surprise, turned out to be none of my goddam business, Tidy has started sending my niece Rotel to one of those honky upper-middle-class god-affiliated schools where the kids wear uniforms and attend mandatory “chapel” sessions. For the past few months I have been nervously eyeballing the child, ever alert for signs that the faithy godbag indoctrination has begun to take, so that I might countermand that moron crap with an auntly intervention of Question Authority-ism. So far it’s been all clear, which is why it was quite a jolt when, during a recent babysitting gig, young Rotel broke into song, and the song she broke into was not “Fried Ham, Fried Ham, Cheese and Baloney,” but a horrifying ditty about dewdrops of mercy and Jesus and how he is the “light of the world.” The goopy dewdroppy Jesosity blew my mind. There was only one possible response.

“Holy shit!” I said.

Both of the nieces busted out laughing. They know I am prohibited by Tidy from saying “holy shit” in their presence. They don’t know it’s because Tidy is afraid they might repeat it in front of nice people, nice people who will form the opinion that Tidy is a self-absorbed loose-moraled alcoholic for permitting her daughters’ exposure to anyone low-class enough to say “holy shit” in front of little kids. The nice people will have no choice but to call CFS. The nieces will be thrown into foster care, Tidy will be sentenced to lousy-mother prison, and I, corrupter of youth, will face a firing squad.

I’ll get a cigarette out of the deal, though, so it won’t be a total loss.

But I digress. The sad tale of Christian insanity I mentioned at the beginning of this post starts here:

The other day Tidy hears that a public school on the poor side of town has raised over $4000 for Haitian relief. She thinks this is awesome, so she calls up Rotel’s affluent god-based school to suggest that they get a sort of break-the-piggy-bank-for-Haiti initiative going. So the kids might broaden their philanthropical horizons or whatever. To Tidy’s surprise, the god school wasn’t down, not in the slightest.

Not that they are totally ignoring Haiti! Au contraire! They’re “keeping Haiti in front of the students” with “prayer.”

That’s when the laugh erupted and lobe blew out.

It was already pulsating a bit from the smelliness of the idea of repurposing the earthquake as a sort of social studies unit to teach young WASPs, not about human suffering and its root causes, but about compulsory altruism and the duty to allocate a small percentage of one’s white privilege loot to indigent brown foreigners. Totally screwed Haitians = golden opportunity to introduce noblesse oblige to Richie Rich.

Gross, yeah, and a poor substitute for the new world order that would really put things right, but at least it generates a little cash for immediate relief efforts. If you haven’t eaten in 4 days, and you manage to scrounge one of those fabled energy biscuits, do you really give a crap about the motives of the sanctimonious chump who texted 10 bucks to the Red Cross?

This prayer gambit on the other hand. It is difficult to imagine an emptier, worthlesser, time-wastinger, efficaciouslesser gesture. In fact, organized prayer has been proven to be 137 times worse than doing nothing at all. This is because compulsory group participation in phony appeals to a fake benevolent American deity is a political behavior that not only fosters intolerable levels of community sanctimony, but reinforces a culture of oppression through repetition of patriarchal doctrine. So not only do marginalized groups get the immediate shaft in the form of material non-support during a crisis; not only are little kids duped into thinking that muttering a few words in chapel is good for earthquake victims; but organized prayer replicates the deleterious effects of godbagism by storing them in the common consciousness to ensure ignorance and obfuscation of truth for future generations.

The starving, sick, homeless Haitians should really be luxuriating in all that prayer right about now. Who needs food, water, and antibiotics when little rich kids in Texas are, on your behalf, being forced by deluded authority figures to mutter nonsensical crap to an impotent made-up figment?

Mockery Korner

Jill — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:07:31 +0000

I regret that today’s post is one of those posts in which I recycle a couple of reader comments from the trash bin, because they express comicalness. Today’s are both dudely.

In our first example, the author alludes to some Japanese fetish footwear I pictured in a post way back in the Osteopassic Period. I’ve gotten quite a bit of mileage out of that post, as The World At Large continues to google “torture fetish shoes” with no small frequency.

Hello.

I am a man. Yes, I know, please bear with me. I’m one of those men who’se Mother tried to bring him up pro-feminist in the seventies.

My partner, who is a woman, desperately wants a pair of these shoes. “What will you do in them?”, I ask. Just sit around, looking at them, seems to be the idea (as she accepts she won’t be able to stand up), presumably while I cook dinner.

Trouble is, my partner is a student, and has no money, so she wants me to pay 200 pounds (UK) for these shoes. So I ask you: am I more of an instrument of the oppressive status quo if I buy them or do not?

Hey, Man. Seriously? It must be a helluva rush to know you wield Absolute Shoe Power over your woman. Do you also mete out food and shelter, in addition to clothing? Do you write to Internet feminists when your woman, let’s say, wants a sandwich and you aren’t sure if you should be contributing to her fat content?

Damn, that’s hot!

Our second example, wherein a dude named Clinton responds to a recent post about Focus on the Family’s spokesfootballer, is just batshit. I reproduce it here because I love the first line so much: “People like you are the reason that people don’t grow up to be better than they are.”

People like you are the reason that people don’t grow up to be better than they are. Since you refuse to be a good person, why would you expect anyone else to be, as well? You think that Focus on the Family is loony because they are pro-life, but you neglect your own looniness in rejecting the Savior of mankind, Jesus Christ. And apparently it’s okay to insult the very foundation of Christianity (”ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick”), but it’s not okay to take the moral high ground and believe that all life is sacred. Why don’t you do the world a favor and stop blogging, or try and treat people with respect. Even if you’re correct (which you’re not, by the way), people in the wrong aren’t going to admit that they’re wrong if you have a high and mighty attitude, and insult them. If you hope to change anyone’s minds, you need to change your attitude.

Not only is it “loony” not to worship the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, it’s my fault that wrongthinking people don’t change their wrongthinking ways. Because I don’t ask nice enough. One of my favorite arguments ever: wrong may be wrong, but she who points it out is wrongest of all!

Oh, and that last part about my attitude? Clinton plagiarized it word for word from a speech my mother authored and delivered more or less continuously from 1968-1980.

Rednecks vs hogs

Jill — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:01:37 +0000

Do you often say to yourself, “I wonder, what does a feral hog track look like, anyway?” Look no further. Behold the goods. This track was huge enough that I have no wish to encounter the hog what made it. It probably has giant venomous fangs, spiked tail, and 6-inch claws.

Texas has more feral hogs than any other state. That’s because Texas has more rednecks than any other state. It is the fondest dream of certain of these rednecks to hunt wild hogs with pit bulls, so they make sure there are always plenty of’em roaming the countryside, terrorizing the citizenry.

I can get rid of my feral hog by calling one of these rednecks. They offer free hog removal in return for the thrill of the hunt. But then, of course, I’d have rednecks on the farm. I don’t know which is worse. It is, as Stingray said, a question for the ages.

Pre-abortion ultrasound laws generate amusing Onion vid

Jill — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:34:05 +0000

New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Remember this, from last summer?

Oklahoma is the only state in the nation that mandated a physician to both conduct an ultrasound and describe the images to the patient.

“The ultrasound provision takes away a patient’s choice about whether or not to view an ultrasound, and it requires physicians to provide information to their patients that the physicians do not believe is medically necessary,” Toti said.

“It’s an affront to women’s autonomy and decision-making power, and it’s also an intrusion to the physician-patient relationship.”

And this?

“One [Oklahoma] law would require women to fill out a lengthy survey that asks, among other things, about their race, education and reason for seeking an abortion. It asks women whether they’re having relationship problems, whether they can’t afford to raise a child or whether having a baby would dramatically change their lives.

Another section requires doctors to provide detailed information about complications that arise as a result of the procedure.”

The mind reels.

[Thanks, Wiggles]