FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

It seems appropriate to resume writing on a double anniversary.  It has been a full year since my last post, and this week marked four years at my desk job.  Neither one of those things is exactly celebratory, but they do work as a backdrop for today’s ruminations.  I’d like to share with you what I wrote a few nights ago, attempting for the nth time to complete a blog post:

“I am a little ashamed to see that it has been a year since I last wrote.  I realized my absence long ago, but the little obligations that pepper life are numerous and demanding, and the longer I go without writing - whether it is a blog or a song or a thank-you note to a friend - the less momentum I have from my previous expulsions of internal dialogue, and the more self-aware I become of the entire process.

…But it’s funny, as soon as I typed the paragraph above, I got up from the computer and sat back down at the digital piano that sits next to it.  I played through a progression that has been spinning through my head for several months, playing until I was satisfied enough for the moment.  I got up, grabbed my charging cell phone which is being resurrected from a day of dead battery, and called a friend I haven’t spoken to in a few years.  I left her a message, then sat back down to type this paragraph.

…After I typed the second paragraph, I got up to do laundry and finally, close to a year after my new computer was built, began installing iTunes.”

I’m working three separate jobs - the full-time office job I’ve spoken of since my first post, teaching various voice students on weeknights, and acting as my church’s music director on the weekends.  The small windows of time I have in my home are a blur of cooking, cleaning binges, complaining about all the damn cat hair, and collapsing into a haze of video games or aimless internet browsing.  Social efforts wear me out, and so does glancing over the graveyard of my creative efforts - a coloring book, a sewing machine, recording software.  Owning these things is not the same as creativity, the same way that buying and shelving books doesn’t make me more knowledgeable.  But they’re stacked up in my room all the same. 

My reality is common, and I have to remind myself that I chose this.  I pay my rent, I buy my food, I buy something unnecessary that catches my eye, and I concede myself to perpetuate the cycle.  This is equated with responsibility, as enough.  But on its own, the process feels numb and programmed and…dehumanized.  And I realize that this is how most of us function.  Reading this article, I wonder again - at what cost?  (Do read it, it’s worth consideration.)  Earlier this week, a blogger known for traveling the world on a tiny budget and promoting a general exuberance for life wrote that one of her fears was “waking up one day to discover that I’ve fallen into a life of soul-killing disappointment and quiet desperation”.  I suppose it’s the Thoreau reference more than anything else, but my eyes widened as I thought to myself, “That!  I’m…that!”

You must believe me when I say that I know my life is one of extreme privilege and independence.  This is not lost on me, and it keeps me grateful, or at least consistent.  But more noticeably consistent has been the decline of my own vibrancy.  There are moments when I still feel like I could build something just for the sake of creation, because it’s beautiful.  Someone once told me, “Creativity is the highest act of reflecting God, who is the ultimate Creator.”  It strikes me as true.  It also strikes me as lofty in an age of disregarding art as superfluous, mere decoration.  I can understand how I’ve come to consign the majority of my awakeness to an illusion of control over my own provision.  I can understand how aberration from this well-worn pathway causes discomfort in well-meaning (or not) people, and it is almost as much for those people that I have embraced a “normal” and “steady” job as it is for myself.  Yet for every voice that has preached their message of prudence, there has been a disproportionately larger group who dissent, who recognize me, who don’t much care for the angled “we can’t all be astronauts” argument.  I have a harder time hearing them, or believing them.  But the longer I silence myself, the more I find I’ve disappeared.  And I have to evaluate whether pacifying my body with my most believable promises of rent, groceries, and shiny distractions to take the edge off is worth more than I am.

So, back to my earlier blog clip.  Despite exhaustion and an ever-lengthening mishmash task list with Sisyphian overtones, I began again, and that lurch set me in motion for all the little things I kept setting aside for the vague “later”, whether they were chores or connections or inspiration.  I hope, especially so in documenting it, that I will remember the curious feeling of unleashing, being set in motion, and that I will not be so enticed by familiarity and cowardice that I lull to a stop once more, at least not the same one.

I have a long list of other things I’m looking forward to sharing and discussing with you, but they can wait.  For now, just this, my little moment of movement.

I was raised to be an independent woman; to be free and responsible for my own life and to achieve these things through my own work and study. Somehow, in the course of my pursuit of all these things, freedom became the most cherished value of all to me. It acquired several meanings throughout my life. It meant, first of all, to be able to discover the world, to meet different people, to experience different cultures, different things, to learn more, to hear, read, write or dance. It meant an incessant search for all things that were real and true.

Second, it meant being able to make my own choices, to be able to be the one setting the course I wanted to follow (even if, of course, support from others was needed much more often than not). It also meant being economically independent which this led me to invest heavily in my studies. I always believed this to be my way, the only way I could pursue my dreams and still be faithful to the things I believed in. It was the closest I could get to the way I felt as a woman and as a person. Hence, this pursuit of freedom deeply defined who I am today. It was both liberating and exhausting. Actually, I should say that it was liberating for many years and it becomes more and more exhausting as time goes by.  

There is something to be said about what freedom really represents.  (This is why and where Flying entered my life in such a wonderful and surprising way…) The pursuit of my dreams and my independence has led me to study and work in different European countries. What a wonderful experience this was and has been…. To get to know different cultures, traditions, people, languages, how to live with and in them; to find more about myself and about my own boundaries when facing different challenges or speaking different languages. Moving around can be extremely enlightening and fulfilling at so many levels, many more than I could have ever imagined.

However, what I did not foresee when I made these choices, is what freedom, in the sense I have experienced it, really means. It is a bittersweet thing. Indeed, while the thrill never really went way, many things became burdensome. Home became a rather undefined word to me and although I still believe Portugal to be it, I often feel at home at many different places and on the downside… nowhere at all.

Relationships also became difficult to take to the next level, what is the next level when I keep moving around, and what is the present if it almost always implies some distance? Work became a collection of challenging and interesting projects that are usually temporary and thus never see the light of a new year, that never see continuity or growth. I will not even mention the possibility of motherhood… 

The choice of freedom above all things, thus, has its perks and its burdens, as any choice has anyway. What I didn’t know when I made it was that there would be a day where it would be too late to choose to stop, to belong again and to come back to the place that I left behind and still find it and feel it as my home (and vice versa).

An article in The Economist last year about being a foreigner said it beautifully: “The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland, which they left behind changes, the culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, Forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.  Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasizes over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother. But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.” [The Economist, 17.12.2009, “Being Foreign”]

What if I would have known what I know now back then (the old question…)? Well, that goes without saying… I would have chosen freedom anyway. After all, as a wise woman in the film says, being free is a luxury that many people don’t have.

 I believe that David Brooks is a smart man. I also believe that deep within him lies a belief in Manichaeism, that is, that the world is divided into dark and light, good and evil, and each person must choose his or her side or thereby lose his soul.

More important for Brooks, each nation must choose its side, or lose its way. For Brooks:

If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.

You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.

For Brooks, such a time in world history was defined by clear enemies: those who murdered the innocent, and those who came to their rescue (forgetting the so-called rescuers who turned the innocent away because they were undesirables). You’ll notice in his history that Stalin and Hitler are mentioned, but not Franco, for our response to Franco was shameful, and many good men and women died on our watch while we did nothing.

But, because we knew we were not perfect, Brooks says, we would have been aware.

At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.

As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”

And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.

I love this. A cold war liberal. Were these the fine folks that dragged us into the Korean War?  Were these the cold war liberals who failed to help the Hungarians in 1956? Were they the cold war liberals who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion? Did they invade the Dominican Republic?

Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s.

Was that before or after we murdered Allende and installed Pinochet? Helped the Argentinian Generals with their Dirty War? Supported the torturous regimes in Africa? And Reagan? What do we qualify him as?

Actually Reagan is missing from Brooks’ entire formulation. Shall we talk about the millions who starved while Reagan played war games? Or the regimes in Central America that butchered their people funded by our illegal arms deals with Iran?

But Brooks has a new champion. Someone he can, well, patronize, because he’s a “young thoughtful black man.”

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Brooks wants us to believe that we can believe in Obama because he will take a Christian approach to fighting evil in the world. And while it might not be the Christianity of a King or a Bonhoeffer, we must be assured that it’s not the Christianity of Urban II, who began the First Crusade.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am a Pacifist, but I do believe that we cannot sit on our hands when evil is being done to others. I believe that, if there is a purpose to our lives, it is that we were put on this earth to help each other out. That means we feed people, we comfort them, we clothe them, and, if need be, we protect them from bullies.

My thoughts about this have been influenced by a wise woman I know from Pakistan, who reminds me that it is not the responsibility of Western women to rescue women persecuted by their religion, but rather to work with these women to empower them so that they may throw off their own shackles.

But reality tells me that sometimes, violence is involved. I’m not a Manichean. There is too much gray within me. But that gray still calls out for justice.

And, as I have stated before, I am not a Christian.

And so, I pull out the speech, the inspiration, that reminds me of my responsibility. It is a responsibility that reminds that a lot of evil has been done in the name of doing good. But it is a responsibility that comes from the artist’s heart, from the rebel’s heart, from a Nobel Laureate’s heart.

“That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as
for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when
he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it
is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not
to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent
this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we
can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us,
who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great
unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to
the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know
that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear they
will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and
that after an interval of two thousand years we may see the sacrifice
of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is
either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to
death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still
be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges
you to join us?”

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively.
Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even
more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a
compromise or else giving its condemnations the obscure form of the
encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the
virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that
case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the
others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is
not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it
awakens in me. I can speak only of what I know. And what I know–which sometimes creates a deep longing in me–is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices–millions, I say–throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men.”
Albert Camus–”The Unbeliever and Christians” from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

 I do not know what it is to be a woman in Israel. I cannot pretend to, as I have never been there. I have friends who have lived in Israel, some observant Jews, some not, but other than that, I don’t have much of a clue. Yes, of course, I read things. But I just want to point out, before I begin,  that I am not speaking as an Israeli woman.*

I am speaking as an American feminist who is trying to figure out the mixed messages that women are sent in Israel, and the frightening world of surveillance that many Israeli women live under. (And if Israeli women live under surveillance, multiply that exponentially to get to Palestinian women’s experiences.)

But I was struck by two stories that appeared close to one another in Ha’aretz, one of the more leftist Israeli newspapers. In one story, a woman was arrested for praying at the Western Wall (frequently referred to as the “Wailing Wall.”) In another, women can be forcibly inducted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) if they are thought to be faking their religiosity.

As many of you know, all Israeli young people–male and female–are required to serve in the IDF.  According to War Resisters International, Israel violates young people’s human rights in that there is no conscientious objection status for men, and only partial c.o. status for women.

A woman can claim c.o. status:

Art. 39 (c) deals with the exemption of women with a particular religious background. According to this article: “A female person of military age who has proved, in such manner and to such authority as shall be prescribed by regulations, that reasons of conscience or reasons connected with her family’s religious way of life prevent her from serving in defence service, shall be exempt from the duty of that service.”

Men are allowed to claim religious education (e.g. studying to be a Rabbi) as a basis for exemption, but with women (who may not join the Rabbinate,) the right to claim c.o. status is directly linked to her family’s level of religious orthodoxy. Article 39 seems to assume that a woman (who is apparently old enough to fight and die for Israel) is still subject to her family’s religious beliefs. In other words, she is not recognized as her own person, but as an extension of her father. The religious exemption is not based on objection of war, as Judaism is not a pacifistic religion; rather, it is the family’s fear that she will “stray.”**

The legislation on exemption of religious women is based on Jewish tradition, which does not permit daughters either to stray from their father’s authority or to live in a mixed-gender society. Military service by women would conflict with both these proscriptions, hence with the traditional religious way of life.

Art. 40 specifies exemption on religious grounds. According to it, exemption is permissible when: “(1) reasons of religious conviction prevent her from serving in the defence service and (2) she observes the dietary laws at home and away from home and (3) she does not ride on the Sabbath.”

I would be curious as to whether there is someone reading this who can enlighten me why these same observances do not preclude men.

November 22nd saw the introduction of a bill that will radically change this.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Sunday approved a bill aimed at curbing the growing number of secular girls evading service in the Israel Defense Forces by claiming to be religious.

The bill, which was proposed by the Defense Ministry, advises that the Israel Defense Forces keep close surveillance on every prospective recruit who cites religion as a reason not to complete service. This way, say minister, the IDF will have an easier time determining which claims are valid.

The article does not detail how a woman’s religiosity will be determined. Will she have to take a test? I assume that this will automatically preclude any Conservative or Reform Jew from claiming the exemption. But what does a woman have to do to prove that she’s religious “enough.”

Approximately one-third of women seek the exemption. This is seen as a problem, but this bill is also seen as a continuation of the struggle between the secularists and the religious in the Knesset.

The most chilling part of the bill is the surveillance apparatus that these new rules will create:

Hasson called his bill an opportunity intends to equalize the conditions under which women can receive exemptions, characterizing the ministers’ proposal as one that would simply enable the establishment of a team of private detectives whose sole purpose would be to follow up on women already exempt from their military service

Imagine: private detectives whose sole purpose is to follow women exempt from military service to make sure they are religious enough.

Having just read that article, you can imagine my bewilderment when I read this article:

Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz said the act was a provocation meant to turn the wall into a fighting ground. “We must distance politics and disagreement from this sacred place,” Rabinowitz said.

Rabbi Gilad Kariv, associate director of Israel’s reform movement, said that all over the world women are entitled to wear the tallit, and only in the land of the Jews are they excluded from the social custom and even arrested for praying.

Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party’s spiritual leader, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are “stupid” and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not “for heavens’ sake.”

I have quoted most of the article because I find it appalling. In effect, a woman was arrested for wearing a prayer shawl and reading the Torah at the Wall. She was arrested because the courts have ruled that visitors to the Wall must comply with its dress code.

In the practice of something private, praying to G*d at a holy site, this woman was arrested. Someone was watching her. Ironic, huh? Not religious enough? You’ll be noted in some little book. Trying to practice the religion? Back in the book.

Both cases are about how women are not seen by Israeli law as equal in the eyes of God. They can die for their country, but they cannot pray for it–at least not in places that have been reserved for men.

Why does this infuriate me so? I’m not Jewish. I support a two-state solution, in which both Palestine and Israel would be recognized as sovereign nations. (Yes. I’m aware that Palestinians are second-class humans in Israel. I’m not trying to have that argument.)

But I find it interesting that, when you have determined that women are lesser beings, the perimeters that you put around acceptable female behavior is so constricting that “too much” –whichever way you go–brings you into conflict with your society.

Israel is a modern nation. The United States is a modern nation, but we have our own issues that are similar to those of Israel. For example, women are still exempted from conscription. I do not believe that anyone should be conscripted, but if the draft exists, then everyone–male and female, rich and poor–should be eligible. I don’t think that women in this country will have full equal rights until they can be drafted. ***

Military service for women is fraught with danger–not only from the enemies, but also from your fellow servicemen.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

In this country, there are those who continue to insist that while women are also children of God, they are first their fathers’ daughters, and then their husbands’ wives. Their personhood is defined by their relationship to men.

Such seems to be the case in Israel. The only route to conscientious objection in Israel is to claim that one’s father’s religious beliefs preclude one from being exposed to military culture. Where is the claim that you simply do not want to participate in what you perceive as an immoral war? Can you serve in a non-combat position?

Perhaps this blog post makes little sense. I cannot pinpoint what made my eyes skip through the headlines to settle on these two separate stories. But as I read both of them, I envisioned Israeli women in a box.

And, as I hear our politicians negotiate a health care bill that would preclude women’s access to medical procedures because of some legislators’ moral concerns, I realized that we’re in a box, too. Maybe a different shape and color. But a box nonetheless.

*See Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things You Need to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

**Friends of mine were part of the Peace Now! movement in Israel. They were at a rally when a friend of theirs was killed by a fellow Jew, who objected to those who objected to Israeli policies.

***Newt Gingrich once famously said that women should not serve in combat positions because sitting in damp fox holes would give them yeast infections. (He said it more crudely.)

Update:

I’ve just assigned an essay to my students for them to read.  By chance, the Western Wall comes up in the essay.

From Richard Rodriguez, “The God of the Desert,” Harper’s

“After the Six Day War, the Israeli government bulldozed an Arab neighborhood to create Western Wall Plaza, an emptiness to facilitate devotion within emptiness–a desert that is also a well…

Western Wall Plaza levels sorrow, ecstacy, cancer, belief. Here emptiness rises to proclaim its unlikeliness to God, who allows for no comparison. This is His incomparable Temple. It does not resemble. It is all that remains.”

The Guardian reports that a new drug, originally tested as an antidepressant, has been shown to increase sexual desire in women.

Women who took the drug during the six-month trial reported more satisfying sexual encounters and higher libidos than those who were given a placebo.

Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug is flibanserin, and was tested in Germany as an antidepressant. Turns out, it was a lousy cure for depression, but women taking it reported a wonderful side-efffect: an increase in sexual desire.

The new drugs raises several questions for me.

1. How quickly will it be approved by the U.S. FDA?

2. Will insurance companies pay for this drug the same way they currently pay for male ED treatments?

But I have other questions, too. If both men and women go through periods of diminished sexual desire, (assuming that this is not a permanent condition), then can’t the decrease in sexual desire be seen as a natural rhythm in the life cycle? Are there times when nature simply doesn’t want us to have sex?

My most important question is this, however. We already have a horrible time in this culture accepting that women have sexual desires. We still categorize women by either the “girls-gone-wild” hook-up culture or the “Purity ring-wearing not-until-I’m-married” group. We think we’ve made progress on this, but evidence suggests otherwise. How quickly are women condemned for deviations from the sexual norm? How quick are we to label sexually active teens girls as somehow wrong in what they’re doing (even if they are being responsible and using birth control).

And what about the ultimate form of punishment: The withholding of contraceptive knowledge from sexually -active women as a form of social control. We insist on teaching abstinence-only education, try to limit young women’s access to contraceptives, and make it a crime to transport a woman under 18 across state lines to get an abortion. Given that there are few states left where one can get an abortion, we’ve de facto made it illegal to help young women get abortions unless it’s their parents who are directly involved. (And how come these same people who believe that these young women are too young to make the decision to have an abortion are therefore old enough to make the decision to bear a child?)

The same problems faced by young women are also faced by those women who do not have the financial means to travel interstate, or who do not have the money to pay for this medical procedure. And, if they do have the money to pay for the medical procedure, how much shit will they have to endure to get into see an ob-gyn who still performs abortions?

My point is that, once again, our culture will send mixed messages to women. Now, those whose libidos are going through a temporary cool phase will be told to get with the program and take a drug. Those who want to heighten their desire and take advantage of the drug will be seen as “loose” women for wanting to enjoy sex. And, while insurance companies may pay for women to have sex, they won’t pay for the consequences of sex.

What a mad world we live in.

Being fat in Japan is no longer a matter of shame or embarrassment: the size of your waist is now determined by law.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.

An American journalist, living in Japan writes:

“I am back in Japan, living in Tokyo for a year, and one of my Japanese co-worker recently stopped joining the other men for lunch at restaurants; instead, he began bringing a small bento box. When I asked why, he said his wife believed he was getting fat and required him to eat her pre-approved portions.”

Not surprisingly, there are unintended consequences. Eating disorders are prevalent, especially among young women. When Ralph Lauren was criticized by the U.S. media after digitally altering an image of already-slender supermodel Filippa Hamilton to make her appear even skinnier, I was not surprised that a company executive said the advertisement had only appeared in Japan.

Maybe you are thinking, “Good. Too many fat people in the world. Maybe this is the way to get people to quit being so obese.”

I guess I don’t see it this way.

For me, regulating someone’s waistline is akin to telling a woman what she can do with her body when she is pregnant. It’s called privacy. It’s a matter between a person and his/her doctor. Your doctor may tell you that you need to lose weight to maintain your health. But the government? Mandating your weight?

I keep thinking about Ceaucescu in Romania, who, determined to see birthrates rise in his country, outlawed abortion. Women underwent mandatory pregnancy tests at work. And the orphanages filled to capacity with abandoned children.

How can a government tell a member of its populace what the limits of its body is? How can the government tell any woman that she must stay pregnant?

If the idea that someone could come up to you in a restaurant and tell you not to eat dessert because your waistline exceeds the national standard, imagine how it must feel to have a total stranger tell you that you must carry a baby to term?

For me, there’s no difference.

Privacy is privacy.

Body sovereignty is body sovereignty.

Bitter? Moi?

Mais, non! I live in the greatest country in the world. Everything we touch turns to gold! Why, just look at all the great things we’ve accomplished in Afghanistan!

In today’s Guardian, we learn that Three Cups of Tea and The Kite Runner be damned, things are NOT better for women in Afghanistan.

Afghan women protest at the proposed new family law Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

(For more of my writing on this subject in the past, see When Will Women Matter; Faces; Will Women Pay for Peace in Afghanistan; and How Can I Bear It?.)

According to reporter Janine di Giovani:

Eight years later I returned, but the Afghanistan I found was far from jubilant. Despite the money poured into reconstruction and development, it is one of the five poorest countries in the world. There is 40% unemployment – nearly 80% in some parts of the country. A third of children under five are malnourished. Life expectancy is 43 – and it is one of only three countries in the world where women die earlier than men.

Did you read that statistic? LIFE EXPECTANCY IS 43 and women die earlier than men. 

You would think, given those miserable statistics, that perhaps the United States and the Afghan government would be looking at ways to improve the lives of its people, especially its women.

Yeah, right. When things aren’t going right in a society, what’s the first thing that gets blamed? Lax morality. And who is responsible for lax morality? Yep. Us. Those daughters of Eve.

I arrived to meet women before the presidential elections next month and to talk about a new law, which if brought in, could have drastic repercussions for women. The Shia Family Planning law was signed last March by President Hamid Karzai in an attempt, many believe, to appease powerful mullahs. The Afghan constitution allows Shias to have a separate family law from the Sunni majority based on traditional Shia jurisprudence, and some think the law is linked to the August elections and the Shia electorate who would have to abide by it (they could form up to 20% of the electorate).

The proposed law led to furious protests from women’s groups. It sanctioned marital rape and brought back Taliban-era restrictions on women by outlining when a woman could leave her house and the circumstances in which she has to have sex with her husband; Shia woman would be allowed to leave home alone “for a legitimate purpose” only which the law does not define, and could refuse sex with their husbands only when ill or menstruating.

You see? The best thing for a woman who is not going to live very long anyway is to just have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not; to stay in her house; and to keep her fucking pie-hole shut.

Following international outrage, Karzai backtracked and said the law would be reviewed. This month it was amended and re-signed by the president, but has not yet been ratified by parliament. Human rights groups say it is unclear how much the amendments have done to improve the law. And the law has already achieved its aim – instilling fear and insecurity among an already traumatised female population.

Soraya Sobhrang, a human rights activist I met in her Kabul office, says, “The law will affect all women if it goes through. It opens the door for other repressive laws to be passed, for Sunni Muslims as well as Shia.” A young doctor friend, Najeeb Shawal, says he is seeing more female patients who were depressed since news of the law emerged. “They have the kind of hopelessness that comes with knowing your life is incredibly repressed. And might become more so.”

Congratulations. The law is already working. We love it when women are depressed. That means we don’t need to worry about them going outside and making a ruckus. Instead, they’ll just stay inside, and, if we’re really lucky, they’ll stick their heads in gas ovens or set their burqas on fire. Everybody wins!

By the way. Karzai’s original excuse for signing the law? He didn’t read it before he signed it. 

There are bright spots in Afghanistan:

Bamiyan is the home of the Shia Hazara, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. I am surprised by the “city’s” remoteness because there has been a huge outcry here from the women over the law: demonstrations, protests on the radio, grass roots organisations very quickly coming together. I meet one of the protest leaders in a small restaurant overlooking the holes in the mountain left when the Taliban blew up the ancient Buddha statues there in 2001. Batool Mohammadi is 27, black-robed, and heavily pregnant. “The law does not fit with humanitarian law,” she says. Batool, a Hazara, comes from the generation of Afghan women born after the Soviet invasion and raised during the Taliban era. She has only known war, conflict and repression. The small window of triumph after the fall of the Taliban – who brutally repressed the Hazaras – has given her a taste of freedom and she is not ready to give it up. “In an area as traditional as Bamiyan, one of the major problems with this law is that it will stop the trend towards modernisation.” As Batool leaves, she says that when her baby is born in June, she wants him or her to enter a world moving towards equality, not repression.

The governor, Habiba Sarabi, is the former Minister of Women and as a Shia will have to obey the law if it is passed. She meets us in her sparse office, a grim, Soviet-style building set on a windswept plain. There are plates of nuts and fruits and the governor, looking exhausted, nibbles dried apricot. At 53, Sarabi is no-nonsense. She is a chemist by trade and speaks good English. The daughter of an illiterate mother who encouraged her daughter to read and write, she tells me when she was young she was mocked as she walked to school alone. Having struggled so hard it was particularly hard to see her own daughter, now 24, denied education under the Taliban. The family escaped to Pakistan and Sarabi worked on human rights and women’s projects.

On the new law, she tries to be diplomatic, but I can tell she is concerned: “Fortunately, women raised their voice.” She is confident (perhaps overly so) that the law will not go through. But later, at her residence, when she curls her stockinged feet under her, she admits the wider crisis. Bamiyan is one of the few success stories in Afghanistan: it is poppy-free, the government functions well, and as she points out, “It is the safest place in Afghanistan. The rule of law is important here.” She has improved the education and health services (instigating midwife programmes, for example, in a province that has one major hospital). But can this last? If, following elections, Karzai succumbs to the mullahs (who exercise huge political power in Bamiyan and the rest of the country), for how long will it be safe for women? Even Sarabi finally admitted that if the law is ratified, it would affect her too.

But those women who have been unaffected by these new laws are rare. And a lot of women are frightened: who wouldn’t be?

Women who have managed to cross gender boundaries seem in a state of shock over the law. Jamila Barekzai is a police officer whose female colleague was killed by the Taliban last year in Kandahar for daring to do a mans’ job. When I go to meet her at the Central Afghan Police Headquarters on the edge of Kabul, next to one of the biggest Shia mosques in the city, she is wearing her olive uniform and heavy black eyeliner. She was transferred from Kandahar last year to Kabul when she thought she would be killed too. She takes out her mobile phone and plays a recording of an unnamed Taliban telling her to stop working, “or you will be taught the lesson we taught your friend”. She says she was mainly frightened for her children and touches the gun at her hip.

President Obama has committed more troops to Afghanistan, ostensibly for finding that guy (what was his name? the one who blew up the towers?) and gettting the increasing threat of terrorism from the Swot Valley in Pakistan under control.

But are women on President Obama’s radar? Are we going to be willing to trade stability in the area for the lives of millions of Afghani women who will once again be confined to their homes, illiterate, ill-considered, depressed, and basic sperm receptacles for their husbands? Is this the legacy that Obama wants to leave in Afghanistan?

Or can we start, right from the beginning, by saying to Karzai that yes, we know you have us by the gas hose right now because you have access to that pipeline we want, but hey, women are people, too.

Please, President Obama. If we are to go to war in Afghanistan, make it mean something. I do not want to have to write in five years that we have subdued the terrorists, but once again, we have paid for it with women’s lives.

President Obama, First Lady Obama, Secretary of State Clinton–anyone–everyone–who will listen: do not turn your backs on the women of Afghanistan. They are not collateral damage. We are not collateral damage of war. We are human beings. We have feelings. And bodies. And we hurt. And we ache. And we grieve. And if, once again, we are told that it is more important that we are treated like pieces of shit so that some problem may be solved, it may be that some of us may not be able to take that anymore.

So please.

I beg you.

On my knees.

For the women of Afghanistan.
Don’t. Forget. Us.

When I leave, someone tells me the Taliban spring offensive has begun, American troops are pouring in, and President Karzai is beginning his political campaign. I keep thinking of Batool, the pregnant activist in Bamiyan, and her baby, and her life in 20 years’ time. If the law does not pass and women continue rolling on, she has a chance. If not, she might still be wearing a burka and never learn how to drive.

—–

Governor David A. Paterson has directed that flags on New York State government buildings be flown at half-staff on Thursday,  July 16, 2009,  in honor of  a Fort Drum Soldier  killed in Afghanistan on July 9, 2009.
Spec. Joshua R. Farris of La Grange, Texas, died in Wardak Pronvince of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.  Spec. Farris was a member to the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 10th Mountain Division.
” I speak for all New Yorkers when I say that we will forever honor the service this young soldier gave to our nation, ” said Governor Paterson.  “He was not a native New Yorker, but we consider all soldiers stationed at Fort Drum to be one of our own.  On behalf of the people of the State, I extend our deepest sympathy to the family, friends and fellow soldiers of Sepc. Farris.”
Governor Paterson has directed the flags on all State buildings to be lowered to half-staff in honor and tribute to our State’s service members who are killed in action.

And the beat goes on….

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

–Virginia Woolf

I was in the midst of printing out this article, on the poor mothers of Haiti, when I spotted the most recenty copy of The Week, a subscription I still don’t know how I got, and whose viewpoint and presentation of the week’s events, I generally disagree with. But they do run quotations down a little sidebar, and the Woolf quotation made me sit up and take notice, because, in fact, I had been preparing to try to blog about this important article in the SUMMER 2009  Virginia Quarterly Review

I was intending to do just what Woolf was talking about: to be the observant fellow pointing at the outskirts of an agony. But it gets stranger, for the the book I had bought today with the intention of re-reading is Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, which talks about the fact that we are constantly looking at how others suffer–on television, through photography, internet, etc., and what does that do to us?

And here’s the part that’s a little mind-blowing. The first line of Sontag’s book is In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Sontag argues that, as Woolf had done when confronted with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, many of us feel that if we simply show “you” or the reader or the outside world, what have you, that those photographs will move you to the same action that we want you to take. That you will feel the same thing.

And so when I show you the ravages of starvation and malnutrition on the faces of women and children in Port-au-Prince, that you will do  ….
What?

What is it that I want you to do?

And suddenly, my desire to blog about what’s going on in Haiti feels exploitative, or some feeding of some part of myself that really, really does want to point to suffering and to tell you to do something about it. If I had the money, I think, I would change the world, feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the illiterate, stop conflict.

And I feel guilty.

As if I am doing something wrong. Why am I writing about these things?

Sontag writes (pg. 18)

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Warns are now also living rooms sights and sounds. Information about what is happenening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence—”If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guidelines of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows–to which the the response is compassion, or indignation, or titilation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.

We are all surveyors of the violence, the misery, the suffering of the human condition. Some of us seem to have little trouble shutting it out, insisting, for example, that what the photos at Abu Ghraib show us are simply frat pranks gone amok. Whereas I not only see in them great cruelty toward other humans, it makes me so angry that I want to shake it in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it?

Sontag’s book is brilliant and dense and I find myself wanting to quote huge swathes of it so that we could discuss it. But she is arguing among a number of interconnected points: What does the constant exposure to images of suffering do to us? Does it  make us more compassionate or less so? Does it make evil more banal and everyday? Does it desensitize us, make us cynical, passive?

But what’s the alternative? Not to look?

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflincting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties to other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

I have grown tired of hearing people who should know better say things such as “Americans don’t torture.” Even confronted with the photographs, they put it down to one or two bad apples. They do not accept that inflicting suffering upon other human beings is part of human nature.

Some of us believe ourselves to be incapable of deliberately inflicting such pain on others, and I believe this of myself, but I have not been in the place of those whose wickedness was provoked or whose suffering was recorded.

I know that when I decide to blog about the women of the Congo, or about PTSD, or the plight of children here or of Mother Earth, it feels like it’s coming from a place of a hard-earned determination to try to see the world as it is. And what’s more, to try to persuade you to see the world my way, too.

I want you to get angry that there are 300,000 child slaves on the island of Haiti. I want us to do something about it. I want us to do something about the traumatized bodies of the women of the Bakavu.

Okay, I’m beginning to breathe now, and I see where I am going with this. This afternoon, listening to NPR, someone said something about our collective desire to put what happened during the last administration behind us. But I’m not part of that collective desire.

I want the administration that ordered the illegal tortures, the war crimes, those people–even though they are Americans, and thus I should somehow believe that we, as Americans,  are better than that which we did–I want them to be punished.

I want to be absolved of any complicity in the invasion of Iraq. I want to be absolved of any feelings of guilt I have about what my fellow countrymen and women have done to the peoples of other lands. I am not willing to accept that we are all guilty because we let ourselves be fooled into going off to war against Iraq.

I was not fooled. I was never fooled. And I shouted and shouted, along with a lot of other people, and in the end, what did our shouting get us? An illegal war. Atrocities committed in our name. Torture.

I have this terrible feeling that I am beginning to understand what it was like to be an “ordinary German.” I didn’t vote for Bush; I didn’t support his policies; I wrote as much as I could against what he and his minions were doing. But it wasn’t enough. They still did it. And because we want so much to move on from this, to put it in the past, to move on to issues of health insurance and the economy, they will most likely get away with it.

And what, ultimately, did I do to stop them? Wrote a few letters? Participated in a few protests? Wrote and wrote? Cried? Argued?

Was there something else that I should have done?

That’s the question that I’m sitting here with at this late hour of the night for me. My talents are writing and teaching. But if all I did during the Iraq War was to write against it and teach ethical values, and the war still went on, and I did nothing more: I didn’t stop paying my taxes, I didn’t move to another country, I didn’t get myself arrested. I didn’t stop one single, solitary moment of the horror of what my nation perpetuated.

That’s fine. I’m one person. To think I could have changed the situation is too narcissism in the extreme; but to not have changed the situation is painful to me.

How do I make amends for what my country has done?

What more could I have done?

And thus I return to the blog post I was going to write about the women in Haiti. I suppose I would have quoted from the article, pulled more photos from it, and then, suggested you make a donation to the charities that are keeping those women alive. But if that’s all I did, would it have been enough?

Is being the observer on the outskirts of a calamity and pointing, enough?

Anyone?

Image taken from The Art of Romance: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs by Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien

Am I more than my body?

As a woman, of late, I feel as if I have had to defend the boundaries of my body in order to prove and preserve my personhood.

Forces abound that seek to put me in my place–violently, if need be. (Paul Krugman’s column this morning is masterful. Please read it.)

I see at work in our culture. I have written before about laying claim to my own body and rejecting government control over what I do with it. I have written my own privacy manifesta, declaring that my privacy is sacrosanct, and not subject to invasion by either the government or the moral scolds in our culture. And, in the past, disgusted with the Democratic leadership over issues such as confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito without so much as a peep of protest, I considered leaving the party.

You know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of continually having to defend my right to my body. I’m tired of having to say that I’m not your brood mare, that I decide what enters my body, what I carry within my body. I’m tired of this fight. But I have daughters, so I’ll continue this fight as long as I need to.

But I want to say something else. Even as I defend and protect the boundaries of my flesh,  I am more than my body. Women are more than their bodies. Sometimes, I don’t think that everyone thinks so. I’ve read some of the recent posts to OS, and quite frankly, I’ve been sickened. Some of the things that have been written about women make us into nothing but cunts and asses; reduce us to our parts. Our mouths become only good for blow jobs. Our cunts and asses are only good for penetration. Our bodies are broken, bent, spread-eagled, impregnated and harvested for pleasure.

You all know that I’m not anti-sex. I write erotica. Multiple orgasms are … well … you know. And you all know how much I love the man who is my partner.

So, I don’t hate sex or men.

****

I do feel as if we are going backwards as a culture. If, at one point, we were moving toward a sense that women could control their own fertility, women were entitled to equal rights, women’s minds were as fine as men’s and we could compete with them in all intellectual fields, these days, I feel as if we’re having to re-establish that a woman is more than her uterus.

The right wing spews hate against gynecologists who perform abortions, and then refuses to accept responsibility for inciting hate crimes. In fact, to hear some tell it, it’s the pro-choice insistence on a woman’s right to abortion that caused the murder of Dr. George Tiller, not the hateful shit spewed by the right-wing talking wingnuts.

A Latina woman is nominated for the Supreme Court, and suddenly, we have discussions about whether menstruation will affect her ability to make decisions (or whether the pronunciation of her last name is unAmerican, or whether her eating of spicy food is unAmerican, or whether “empathy” makes her unqualified). Never mind that she went to some of the finest universities in the country. She’s a woman, and her body will prevent her from being able to think “rationally.”

I could go on and on.

But I want to get back to the point that I am more than my body. This is not the 15th century, for fuck’s sake. We are not debating the four humors that make up the human body and how women cannot be as smart as men because she’s composed of the wrong essences. We shouldn’t be talking about “hysteria” or “wandering wombs.”

We should not be continuing the old canard, the oldest piece of bullshit, that male is normal and female is “other.”

We should be talking about who is the most qualified to be in the various positions that will help this country get out of the mess it’s in. We should be focusing on the contributions that both men and women can make to improving the world. We should be celebrating the fact that we all bring to the various tables different talents, and we should not immediately eschew one set of talents because the person who possesses them also happens to possess a vagina.

I really didn’t think that I would be 46 and having to argue that a woman can be as good as a man. I didn’t think I would be 46 and having to read defenses of being a misogynist asshole. I thought, mistakenly, that we were going to be past this. I thought that men, women–and the genders in-between–could treat each other with respect, could revel in each other’s brains and hearts, could celebrate difference, instead of either apologizing for it or denigrating it.

I guess I was wrong.

And so, here I am. It’s 2009, I’m 46 years old, and I have to say, I am more than my tits and ass and cunt. I have a brain and a spirit. I am a human being.

I am a human being.

Please don’t ask me to write a history of violence against doctors and clinics who provide reproductive medical care to women.

If you are at all aware, if you have read a newspaper in the past 25 years, you know. You just know.

The Wichita Eagle has a full page of reaction to Dr. George Tiller’s murder on its front page. Last night, mourners turned out to hold a vigil for Dr. Tiller. As usual, those who like to dance on others’ graves also turned out, with their hateful signs. These signs were similar to the hateful twitter messages that ChangeAgent has so masterfully documented over at her blog.

When President Obama said that he wanted to meet in the middle on the abortion issue a few weeks ago, I wrote then that I felt as if he had just thrown women under the bus. There is no middle with anti-abortion extremists. They are not interested in meeting in the middle. They are only interested in one thing: eradicating all abortion, all access to abortion. In many cases, they want to eliminate access to certain forms of birth control, (some–all forms of birth control), and, if they can’t get what they want by legal means, they practice terrorism.

Thus, yesterday was inevitable.

The anti-abortion violence of the 1980’s and 1990’s, when clinics and OB-GYNs were slaughtered–some in their own homes, as Dr. Slepian was, were horrible times. They have left us now, with the experience of going to Planned Parenthood and having to pass through metal detectors and bullet proof glass. If you are going into a clinic where abortions are performed, you have to pass by people who feel it is their job to judge you, no matter why you might be going to the clinic.

These people have no compassion. You may be having to go in for a D&C because your fetus has died inside you–you’re still a babykiller in their eyes. You may be the victim of rape. Babykiller. You may simply be too young, or too poor, or not able to care for a child–you’re a babykiller.

Funny, but I don’t see those same people outside urologists’ offices screaming at men that getting a vasectomy constitutes being a sperm-killer or a potential baby killer.

I wish I could write something eloquent, something full of compassion for those who oppose abortion so violently and ask, “can’t we all get along?”

But I don’t have that in me today.

I am mourning Dr. Tiller. I am mourning the women who decided today that they are too frightened to take care of their medical needs. I am mourning the areas of the country that will lose access to adequate medical care for women. I am mourning the messages that are being sent out–once again–to women that their bodies don’t matter. The only thing that counts about a woman’s body is that she can produce babies. And if she wants to not produce babies, well, if we can’t stop you legally, we’ll close the clinics, kill the doctors, tighten the noose so that you will have to travel thousands of miles to find help.

I grieve. Please don’t ask me to be rational or make sense.

I grieve. And I’m angry.

I grieve, but I will not hurt someone in return.

I grieve, but you will not silence me.

I will grieve, and then I will do whatever I can to fight for reproductive rights.

I repeat the pledge I made a few weeks ago: I will purchase Plan B contraception for any woman who needs it.

To the hate-mongers on television who equate abortion with murder: you condoned this, you encourage those who are unhinged to carry out your dirty work. You should be held accountable. I will not hurt you with violence. But I will write to your advertisers, and I will encourage those who advertise with you, to withdraw their advertising or ask them why they support terrorist sympathizers.

For this is what this is. Terrorism. Plain and Simple. Not done by “foreigners.” But by “Americans.”

There is no excuse for it. None.

And we will fight you. Peacefully. But relentlessly. We will not go back to the days of coat hangers and illegal abortions. We will not sneak around to maintain sovereignty OVER OUR OWN BODIES.

We are here. We are not going away. And you will not frighten us.

I got that feeling again last night. It swelled again this morning, when I read Nicholas Kristof’s piece (about how rape is not treated as a priority crime) in the New York Times. It’s that “it’s not your turn,” feeling. That “don’t be so pushy,” feeling. That “you’re being selfish; don’t you realize that there are much more important things going on in the world than you?”

As a woman, I’ve heard that argument more times than there are members of Congress. I heard it first as a little girl, when it was made clear to me that I need to wait my turn, to not ask for too much, to stop thinking that everything is about me.

The question last night was to President Obama, who was asked about his campaign promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act in his first 100 days. FOCA has not been signed, and last night, listening closely made me uneasy. Yes. The Obama administration has lifted the international gag rule. And yes, the courts have ruled that the Bush administration used politics over science to decide who could have access to the Morning After pill.

But President Obama, when questioned about FOCA last night, sounded suddenly like a man who was brushing off a question he no longer found all that important. Here is the full transcript of the exchange between him and the reporter:

REPORTER: As a candidate, you vowed that one of the very things you wanted to do was sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which, as you know, would eliminate federal, state and local restrictions on abortion. And at one point in the campaign when asked about abortion and life, you said that it was above — quote, ‘above my pay grade.’

Now that you’ve been president for 100 days, obviously, your pay grade is a little higher than when you were a senator.

Do you still hope that Congress quickly sends you the Freedom of Choice Act so you can sign it?

OBAMA: You know, the — my view on — on abortion, I think, has been very consistent. I think abortion is a moral issue and an ethical issue.

I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they — if they suggest — and I don’t want to create straw men here, but I think there are some who suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations. I think, look, this is an issue that people have to wrestle with and families and individual women have to wrestle with.

OBAMA: The reason I’m pro-choice is because I don’t think women take that — that position casually. I think that they struggle with these decisions each and every day. And I think they are in a better position to make these decisions ultimately than members of Congress or a president of the United States, in consultation with their families, with their doctors, with their clergy.

So — so that has been my consistent position. The other thing that I said consistently during the campaign is I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies, which has started to spike up again.

And so I’ve got a task force within the Domestic Policy Council in the West Wing of the White House that is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp, to see if we can arrive at some consensus on that.

Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s — that’s where I’m going to focus.

I’m sorry, Mr. President. I don’t care about the Right’s ANGER on this issue. I care about the fact that there are millions of women in this country who cannot get access to abortion because of the myriad restrictions that have been placed upon the medical procedure by legislators who have no business telling women what they can or cannot do with their reproductive capabilities.

I used to be a lot more moderate in my views. I used to be a lot more willing to listen to the other side’s arguments about what’s involved in abortion. But not anymore. Women die every day in childbirth. Women die every day from botched abortions. Women die every day in Africa from injuries, caused by rape, that are exacerbated by pregnancy. THIS IS NOT A MORAL ISSUE. THIS IS A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE.

Mr. President, this is also an economic issue. If you do indeed care for the working class and middle class who are suddenly struggling to put food on the table, don’t you think you should be worried about the women out there who can’t put food in one more child’s mouth? And don’t tell me she should be using birth control. EVEN WITH INSURANCE, insurance companies manage to get away with charging outrageous co-pays for birth control pills and other devices. (One pack of pills is $25 a month co-pay. That’s a lot of money when you’re struggling.)

If we were talking about any other health issue out there, would we be having this argument? Why, when it comes to women’s bodies and their rights to control their fertility, do these issues suddenly become about morals? Why are you, President Obama, backing away from a promise that you made so that you might spend some time trying to appease those people who do not want women to have abortions at any time for any reason? They are not to be reasoned with.

You cannot make them happy. You cannot make them like you on this issue.

Please stop. Please just do what you said you were going to do. Lift the restrictions on a woman’s health options.

PLEASE.

This post could simply comprise links to work I’ve done in the past three years, in which I’ve documented, over and over again, that women matter less than men in the world. Not just in “Third World” countries, where women die at extraordinary rates in childbirth or as victims of “rape as tactic of war” epidemics that wipe out swathes of women in a marauding army’s path.

Perhaps, I could talk, again, about what’s going on in Afghanistan, a nation that we swore we were going to help restore democracy to, but which, since Barack Obama has become president, we have seen the ceding of control of parts of Pakistan to the Taliban, and new laws in Afghanistan designed to soften up Talibani members so they’ll consider coming back to the Afghan government. Those laws, as you should all know by now, legalize rape in marriage. You should also know that girls attending school in Kandahar had acid thrown on their faces—for the simple crime of attending school. Or that Safia Amajan, an Afghan women’s rights advocate, was gunned down for advocating women’s rights.

Yesterday, on the OP-ED pages of the NY TIMES, Afghan women wrote the following:

That is why President Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan policy speech last month and his administration’s related white paper are worrisome: both avoided any reference to democracy in Afghanistan, while pointedly pushing democratic reforms in Pakistan. The new policy represents critical shifts — such as a new emphasis on civilian work, and recognizing the regional nature of the problem and the inadequacy and abuse of resources. But a faltering commitment to the democratization of Afghanistan and ambiguous statements from Washington on an exit strategy have left us Afghans scratching our heads

…there is a temptation among some in Washington to believe that if the zeal for democratic reform or women’s and minority rights in Afghanistan were relaxed, Taliban insurgents would find “reconciliation” more attractive and the war would end more quickly.

This belief is encouraged by the radically conservative forces that have increased their influence since 2005 over the Kabul government, which has been backtracking on its commitment to rights like freedom of the press and equality under the law. This was exemplified by two events last month: the upholding of a 20-year jail sentence given to a young journalist for printing a controversial article from the Internet that was critical of the role traditionally assigned to women in Islam; and President Hamid Karzai’s signing of a law affecting the country’s Shiite minority that places restrictions on when a woman can leave her house and states the circumstances in which she is obliged to have sex with her husband. That law prompted the protests this week in Kabul.

Before anyone objects that the mistreatment of women is the “Afghan way” in which we must not interfere, let me further quote the article:

As for women’s rights, the troubles that brewed in Afghanistan during the 1990s — civil war, followed by the Taliban’s totalitarianism and harboring of Al Qaeda — were in great part the result of the female half of our population being deprived of social and political participation. Like everyone else, Afghans crave security, justice, accountability, educational and employment opportunities, and a promise of a future.

Democracy and progress are not products to be packaged and exported to Afghanistan. Afghans have to fight for them. Last month, the two of us helped organize “Afghanistan: Ensuring Success,” a conference led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former United States ambassador to the United Nations. Speakers included Afghans from all walks of life and there was broad agreement that, in the words of President Obama, it was time to “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” and strive for genuine democratic progress and self-reliance.

But as we approach Afghanistan’s second democratic elections, in August, we cannot afford to have our allies falter — through rhetoric or policy — in supporting our nascent democratic forces. Those brave and burned young women of Kandahar did not give up. How could we?

I find myself wondering what would happen if, in our commitment to “human rights,” we were insistent that “women’s rights” were part of the word “human.”

Even in our own country, over and over again when the Democrats were struggling to come back to power, I found calls to soften our commitment to abortion rights, gay rights, women’s equality—the so-called “culture war” issues—in order to attract the “swing voter.”  I even watched as gay activists asked women to throw themselves under the bus in order to help gays get rid of a reprehensible U.S. Senator.  “As I wrote then, you could only ask women for so long to put their rights on the back burner before they would turn around and tell you to go piss up a rope.

So. Again. I ask. When, when will defending the rights of women be as important in foreign policy decisions as is considering strategic oil reserves, or the mistreatment of ethnic minorities, or the threat of “Communism” in certain Latin American countries? When will we cut off diplomatic relations with a country that stones its women for adultery or forces them to stay in their homes?

When will we stop with this idea that a woman’s right to control her own fertility, to choose what enters and lodges in her flesh, that her right to own her own body are “culture war” issues, and are instead, human rights issues. Basic issues? Non-negotiable demands that all humans are entitled to make?

Please tell me when women will matter. All women. Not just those who have risen to positions of authority in their country.  All women. Perhaps when we care as much about the schoolgirls in Kandahar as we do about the men of Cuba, I might finally believe that human rights matters to us.

My bona fides in writing about these issues:

http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2009/03/31/will_women_pay_for_peace_in_afghanistan

http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2008/11/25/faces–updated

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=24109

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=24084

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=14583

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=13396

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=13160

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=12387

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10976

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6879

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6705

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5340

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=11981

Rob and I love a hard-fought game of Scrabble. We’ve become addicts—playing anywhere and everywhere—waiting to pick up Chinese food, at work, at the Laundromat. Those games are played on our iPhones; we can choose to pass an iPhone back and forth, or having bought the app, we can play on Facebook when we’re out of each other’s sight. But the best games by far are just the two of us, bent over the Scrabble board, fingering our tiles, our toes touching underneath the table, attempting to outsmart the other one. For two people who are linguaphiles, love the way words feel on our tongues, translating those words into wooden tiles that we lay down on a board as an offering brings with it tension. Frequently erotic.

These days, a game of Scrabble is almost like foreplay. And, like foreplay, we approach it differently each time. Sometimes, I am brazen, playing words like “cunt” and “suck” and “sexy” and “turgid,” to see if the words on the board can get a rise out of him. We joke that I should have all the letters “c” and “q” taken away from me, because if I’m not playing “cunt,” I play “quim” or “quiver.” I want to make sure that he knows where my mind is. It’s on his beautiful brain, of course, and that kind, lovely face that I have memorized. The blue eyes, the silver hair, the sweet mouth that has found so many different ways to bring me to orgasm that sometimes, just looking at his lips makes me wet.

Other times, we play it as a subtle dance. We trade off our 15-point words, matching each other word for word. Rob has taught me to play defensively, and I’ve have learned not to play the clever six-letter word that will net me 11 points when I can play the three-letter word that cuts off all access to a triple word score for him. Kills me sometimes, when I want to show how clever I can be, but sometimes I luck out. Last week, I placed joyful on a triple word score, right after I had placed quest on a double letter for the q and a double word score for the whole thing. I managed to catch up to him after trailing him for 80 points most of the game.

Last night though, he whipped me. We had played a quiet game, and both of us had average about 20 points a word. And then, he did it. There was an “s” on the board and he managed to play the word “christens.” 7-letters for 50 point bonus, plus he was on a double word score. I called him a name then. A multi-syllabic multi-use of the word “fuck” phrase. I didn’t mean it, of course. Just feeling a little competitive. He had left a triple word space open, but none of the letters I had would fit into that space. I played some 11-point word and sulked.

Then, as if to scrape me against the coral until I bled, he played ‘zins’ through the triple word. “That’s an abbreviation,” I said. “It’s in the Scrabble dictionary,” he said. “Yeah, the same one that has the bullshit word “za” and “qi.” We have long arguments about how the Scrabble dictionary is dumbing down the game, making it easier for people with small vocabularies to use their “q’s: and “z”s” The point total for that word came to something like 66. He had jumped over a hundred points in front of me in two moves.

I wasn’t crushed. After all, I’ve beaten him several games in a row, a streak he puts down to the fact that he’s taught me to play the game as it should be played. With strategy, and distraction, and staring at letters until your forehead drops blood onto the tiles from the effort.

I started to say something. “You just hush now,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re done.”

The game finished. 299 to 235. We put the tiles away, our fingers touching as one of us folded the board into a funnel and the other held open the bag.

We’re in the process of moving. Boxes are everywhere, and we went into a spare room that doesn’t get used much. It contains a futon, a desk, and a closet full of clothes. Rob wanted my assistance choosing which clothes should finally be packed off to Goodwill, and so for half an hour, I watched him change in and out of shirts and pants. I could feel myself growing restless.

I’m always restless around Rob. We’ve been together 15 months, and yet, it’s not unusual for us to make love, fuck, screw, roll around like teenagers several times a day. Still can’t keep our hands off each other. Still pass each other and reach out a hand to touch flesh, reconnect.

When he was done changing clothes, he pinned me to the bed. Began with my lips and neck, and worked his way down my body with his tongue. My body responded the way it always does: multiple orgasms that fall on top of one another. I’m vocal when I come. I grunt, and moan, and scream, and plead, and come close to tears. When Rob is inside me, the world comes to an end. It’s just him and me. Nobody else is in the room. Nobody else matters. It’s just flesh and fluid and the sounds of love.

Sometimes, I try to compose love poems to him while he’s touching me, but he always tells me to be quiet. He says it in a commanding voice that makes me even more hot. For someone who thinks too much, who speaks too much, having to experience sex quietly, take it in in the moment that it’s happening, changes the experience.

I am not passive during sex; suffice it to say that a woman who makes her living by producing words is quite adept at using her mouth to express her sexual love.

Rob has sent me a note that he has started yet another Scrabble game via.  Silly game, but oh such serious stakes.

As is typical any morning, I woke up a couple of hours before anyone else, and I started reading papers on the Web. This morning, on the Guardian, one of the major stories is about a new wave of crime in South Africa that is being called “Corrective Rape.”  This abomination in terms is the belief that if a lesbian is gang-raped by men, the lesbian part of herself will be driven out, and she will emerge from the violence as a heterosexual.

I thought that I would devote an entire diary to this topic, but I found, this morning, that I just could not go there. Rape is epidemic: not only is rape a tactic of war in most of central Africa, I have read recently that rape is being used in Haiti to enforce social discipline, and now, in South Africa, to enforce heterosexual norms.

Not to mention the huge numbers of rapes that take place in the United States each and every day.

Instead, I went searching through things I’ve written before. I hoped to find something that would explain to me why, why, hatred of homosexuals and women continue to persist in this world. Why, for example, the fact that Obama is even considering not overturning the bigoted “Defense of Marriage” Act–a legal abomination if ever there was one.

So, what follows is my wrestling with what it is about homosexuality (and by that same logic–women’s bodies) that frightens fundamentalists so. (And I mean fundamentalists of the three major religions–all of whom have strictures on the female body and against homosexuality.)

This diary is not intended to offend anyone, and yet, I have a feeling it will. It’s not intended as a criticism of Christianity; it’s an attempt to understand why theocrats hate and fear homosexuality so much. If we lived in an Islamic country, I’d be making similar arguments, but the majority of the theocrats in this country are Christian. Therefore, I ask these questions of the relationship between Christ and those men.

The theocrats’ hatred of the body is a particular fascination of mine. It’s a topic that haunts me, and, as things get increasingly worse in the United States in terms of the attacks on privacy, and as I feel the water getting hotter and the frogs still not jumping out of the pot, I search for answers, for words, for a way to understand them, extend compassion to them, and change their minds. Yes. I want to be the queen of the universe and make these people see the light. I really want to release them from their fears, because I think they are a people driven by fear. Fear is the basis of addiction. And fundies act like addicts in ways that I’ve articulated before.

And so, I feel obliged to try to feel my way through the relationship between the erotic and the spiritual. The sacred and the profane. Here’s my thinking.

Attempting to find the connections between the sacred and the erotic seems a fool’s enterprise. Immediately, my own intellect begins to mock me, presenting images of lascivious priests, porn shop editions of the Kama Sutra, or jokes about the ResERECTION or the Second Coming.

But, when I can release myself from the shackles of my rational self, I can admit some things. I don’t know if god exists. But I do know that my understanding of the sacred, those moments when awe replaces fear, is linked to my understanding of the erotic-those moments when the distance between two bodies is breached by contact. The hum of flesh against flesh.

I recognize this aspect of myself, this desire, need, to find my connection to spiritual bliss in genital contact. After all, so many of the feelings used by mystics to describe their encounters with the divine have always sounded to my ear like descriptions of orgasm or its afterglow. When scholars make this argument, that religious ecstasy is sexual ecstasy sublimated, they are accused of reductionism. But what of persons such as me, who feel in ways that we are not always able to articulate, that sexual intimacy is as close as we’ll ever come to feeling the fire of the divine? Am I the only one who feels this way?

To speak about sex as if it is capable of elevating us is to risk being accused of not being spiritual enough, of living only on an earthly plain, of privileging the body over the soul. But why? There are few religions that celebrate the body as the gateway to the divine. Mostly, we are advised to subjugate the body to the spirit, to discipline it, to control it, to prevent it from carrying us into excess. And this has never made sense to me.

It has on an intellectual level. I understand the notion of dualities: sacred and profane, suffering and pleasure, good and evil, man and woman. As someone who has studied gender in historical context, I could riff for hours on the association of women with the body, men with spirit, and how both women and the body became the gateways through which evil, the Devil, sin found ways to enter the world.

I look at the scriptural justifications for the ways that Fundies behave in the world, and most frequently, they cite Leviticus, or other books from the Old Testament. Or they quote Paul, who was not Jesus. Or, as I read in an issue of Harper’s, they cite the kick-ass Jesus from Revelations. That kick-ass Jesus scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps he is easier for certain men to relate to.

When I was in Florida a few months ago, I saw a plethora of bumper stickers that read “Real Men Love Jesus.” I’ve been thinking about that bumper sticker ever since. What it means. Real men don’t love the faggy Jesus; you know, the one who had feelings, who wept, who felt suffering on the cross, who urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves, who commanded us to love one another. Love one another. Not to throw stones, missiles, drop bombs. That Jesus may well qualify as a sensitive new-age guy, a metrosexual, a wimp. How can a real man love that Jesus? Loving that Jesus means loving that part of themselves, and well, real men don’t seem to do that.

I cannot speak for other women, but I can speak from my position as a heterosexual woman. When I have read many accounts of male experiences of interaction with the divine, the most frequent image is that of a piercing or penetration by the divine spirit. The metaphor is important for several reasons. I would argue that one of the reasons that there has been such an insistence on separating sex from the sacred is the fear that describing sex and the penetration of the soul homoeroticizes the relationship between men and their gods. I have never seen an instance where a male mystic refers to being engulfed by the divine.

In many hagiographies or confessions about the coming to the divine, there is a sort of negotiation that goes on. A negotiation in which the stubborn soul refuses the love of God, and then at some point, there is surrender.

The negotiations between men and women are similar. And what is the point of the negotiation?  The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you’re not using it for violence. It’s a place for it to rest until the next time it’s needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you’ve put down your weapon, you’ve disarmed yourself, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. You’ve surrendered.

In many of these hagiographies, men lay down the life of the sword for the life of the spirit. In many of the images of the warrior Christ, he bears the sword of justice. Perhaps I’m being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much.

What is the experience of spiritual surrender? In the accounts I’ve read, it’s the sense of penetration, of becoming whole, of feeling a divine presence move into your body. It’s not unlike the experience for women of heterosexual sex. I’m not a gay man. I don’t know if penetrative gay sex inspires the same feelings.

But I come back to the fear again. I come back to the fear of homosexuality. If your deity is male, and you want to be infused with his spirit, what is involved in that process? How can you maintain a distance between your experience of the sacred and more bodily experiences?

 In 2005, incensed that the FDA, which, at the time, was so under the thumb of the woman-hating, sex-hating, body-hating, science-hating Bush administration that it made a decision that Plan B contraception would not be available at pharmacies to those under the age of 18, AND, really pissed off that there were pharmacists who were claiming that their morals didn’t allow them to dispense the drugs,  I wrote the following, in which I offered to serve as a drug mule for underage girls:

The FDA got it half-right this morning. Plan B contraception has been cleared for over the counter dispensation, but only if you are over the age of 18. Younger than 18? You’re shit outta luck, unless you’re willing to go to the doctor’s office and get a prescription yourself. How you’re supposed to do that without your parent’s knowledge, since I’m assuming they’ll get the insurance bills, is beyond me. If you’re lucky, there will be a Planned Parenthood office in your town. But again, that will require luck.

So, here’s the deal. I am making a pledge, which I fully intend to keep. If you need Plan B contraception, and you contact me, I will go to my local pharmacy and get it for you. Your parents don’t have to know.  The CWFA will likely lobby Congress for a bill that will make my activities illegal, but I do not give a rat’s ass for what the CWFA thinks of me.

This is an act of civil disobedience.

I am a whore. Or at least, that’s what I think I’m supposed to accept these days. You see, I’ve used Plan B contraception–twice–because, for various reasons, I didn’t use birth control while I was having sex, and because, at 41, I do not want to get pregnant again, I resorted to Plan B. Pharmacists who want to dispense shame would think of me as a whore.

The pharmacists who refuse to dispense the medication, even with a doctor’s prescription, claim to be doing so because it’s against their morals to do so. They claim they’re saving fetuses. But really? I think they’re punishing women who have sex. Again.

Rather than fight them on this, allow them to cast shame on me for being sexually active and single, I’m just going to come out and say it. I am a whore. I don’t want to get pregnant. I have the wherewithall to fight you, but many, many women–those who feel shame about having sex in this culture don’t have the resources to fight you. And so I’m fighting this on their behalf.

Acquiring Plan B contraception is not as easy as it is made out to be. Several months ago, I started dating a man, things progressed quickly one hot, lazy summer afternoon, and we had sex. The next morning, I woke up, counted days, felt the familiar twinge in my side, and realized I was ovulating. Plan B seemed like a damned good idea. I called my doctor’s office. I asked the receptionist to have one of the docs phone in a prescription for Plan B. “We don’t do that,” she said, in an extremely tight voice. I could hear the disapproval dripping from her voice. I called Planned Parenthood, got an appointment for that morning. I had to pay a full appointment fee and then pay for medication. Not cheap. But I did it. And, I’m delighted to say, did not get pregnant that month.

A few weeks later, I was in to see my doctor for my regular check-up. I asked her why they wouldn’t phone in Plan B contraception prescriptions. “But we do,” she said. I told her what happened. It seems the receptionist had taken it upon herself to deny me Plan B. I have a feeling that said receptionist was going to be in big trouble after I left.

A few months after that, I had cause to use Plan B again. This time, my doctor’s office called the prescription in to my local pharmacy and I picked it up later that day. The pharmacist, who dispenses all of my pills, handed me the drugs with no hassles or lectures, simply asked me if I had any questions. What a relief.

Why am I telling you all of this? For several reasons.

First. Even for me, acquiring Plan B contraception the first time turned out to be a hassle and fairly expensive. If I had been in different circumstances, I may have given up before I got the medication, and then, voila, a few weeks later, may have found myself facing an unwanted pregnancy.

Second. It doesn’t really matter how many pharmacists are, in fact, refusing to dispense the medication. The fact that the ones who are refusing are garnering so much attention means that any woman who gets Plan B is going to have to worry that she’s going to get the pharmacist who’s going to refuse.

In the late 19th century, the Comstock laws made it a federal offense for certain information to cross state lines. In other words, magazines and mail that contained information about birth control was not allowed to circulate. Even though many of the methods of birth control we have now–condoms, diaphragms, and others–were available, the information that they existed could not circulate freely in the culture. Women often didn’t know that they had options.

Increasingly, it’s not that birth control is not available, it’s that the knowledge that it’s available is being repressed. If you live in a small town and need Plan B, are you going to know where you can go if your local pharmacist decides not to dispense your prescription? How can we help these women?

Finally, the pharmacist’s job is not to dispense shame. I don’t know what the figures are for men who’ve attempted to have their Viagra prescriptions filled and been denied. I can’t imagine that there’s been a lot of these cases. Because, when it all comes down to it, it’s still okay for men to have sex. But, because I have sex, and I want access to birth control after the fact, I’m a whore.

I think I’m going to have that embroidered on a pillow.

Needless to say, even among my liberal posters, my plan to start a Plan B underground was seen as usurping a parent’s right to be involved in their child’s sexual health decisions. But you know what? After your child becomes sexually active, you don’t get to be a part of that unless your child asks you to. I’m sorry to say, but that’s the way it works. Either your kid trusts you enough to talk to you about sex, or they don’t. And if they don’t, well tough shit for you.

Today, a judge finally declared that, at least in terms of 17-year olds, the decision to limit Plan B contraception to those over 18 was a “political decision.”

“These political considerations, delays, and implausible justifications for decision-making are not the only evidence of a lack of good faith and reasoned decision-making,” Korman said. “Indeed, the record is clear that the FDA’s course of conduct regarding Plan B departed in significant ways from the agency’s normal procedures regarding similar applications to switch a drug product from prescription to non-prescription use.”

See? This is why some of us are so damned pissed off about the way women are treated. You can buy cold medicine that may screw up your heartbeat, you can buy Tylenol and Ibuprofen, which in overdoses can be fatal, but be a 17-year old who just had sex and thinks, “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and the Bush administration decided you should remain screwed.

So, the question is, will the drug now be available over the counter to younger women?

You know the social conservatives “decried” the decision. Do you want to know why? The social conservatives argue that girls under the age of 18 could be forced to take Plan B contraception by those who are sexually abusing them.

I want you to think about that for a moment. They want to deny 14-year old incest victims from obtaining Plan B because it might be coerced, but, should a 14-year old find herself pregnant because she’s been raped, well, that’s just dandy. Go ahead and have the baby. That’s what God would want.

So, I’m repeating my promise of 2005. If you are under the age of 17, and you need Plan B contraception, send me a PM, and I will make sure that you get it.