A War on Women

Yesterday I read this article, from that bastion of cutting edge journalism, Glamour magazine and was so saddened and outraged and infuriated and horrified and a host of other, less complimentary adjectives, that, like the angriest dog in the world, I could not speak, I could not move, I could only stand and growl. I'm starting to feel like my country is stumbling slowly into The Handmaid's Tale and there doesn't seem to be a good goddamn thing I can do about it. Bits and pieces of women's civil liberties are slowly chipped away: well, no, you can't have an abortion, well, no, you can't have birth control (scroll down), well, no, you're considered potentially pregnant whether you want kids or not, and then, of course, there's the old perennial: well, no, you can't make as much money as a man. Backwards, backwards, the right wing keeps spinning us backwards into a world that never existed in the first place, some kind of crazy Stepford village world where the male children are all cosseted and cared for by loving robots and girls are there only to be saintly mommies or evil whores locked up in pleasure palaces. I cannot, myself, somehow get behind any movement that denies basic human rights to over half the population, and yeah, I think birth control and abortion are extremely basic human rights: the right to control YOUR. OWN. FUCKING. BODY.

I don't understand why the fundamentalists feel they must control everything and everyone. It's not in my lexicon to give one flying shit about anyone's sex life that doesn't involve me, my children or my dog: consenting adults, whatever turns you on, enjoy. The fundamentalists seem to think that if birth control is allowed, than we will all turn into wild raving sex beasts - and what, exactly, is wrong with that picture? Is it that these fundies think they won't be getting any, that without terror and intimidation they can't get laid, or off? Whatever happened to the Republicans accusing Democrats of being a nanny state, of intruding into the family? Because if you're telling me that every time I have sex than I have to have a baby to show for it, each and every time, than, motherfucker, you are SO seriously intruding into my family. Which, by the way, consists of a lot of people who are not biologically related to me; you would be all horrified. And, if that is the case, and sex must inevitably result in pregnancy, than who, in Jeebus' name, is going to provide for all these children, in this society where welfare has been cut and children's medical programs are struggling and dying and so on and so forth?

I am so angry and I hope you are too. Get angry. Speak up. Stand up. Be counted. We have to stop this and we have to stop it now, for all our sakes.