Is it all over?
We’re reaching the end of the line. The US Supreme Court looks forward to turning women (back) into livestock.
If you don’t control your own reproduction, you are livestock.
Too many Supremes and a shitload of Republicans want women in that position. They haven’t yet reached the Taliban zone where they want women penned up, but give them time.
Meanwhile, what is the left concerned about? In the perfect words of Helen Lewis,
The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying “women.”
So half of humanity is shoved into body slave status, but the important thing is the feelings of a few thousand people who have the time to worry about their gender identity.
That is the end of the line. When nobody, anywhere, on any side of politics, has a clue which way is up.
The previous post has three comments that belong here because it took me so long to get this posted because, honestly, what’s the use.
(Yes, I’m feeling hopeless. Why do you ask?)
quixote on May 17th, 2022 at 14:22
Thank you for putting the post up even if things look pretty hopeless right now.
Bearing witness is painful but important. It keeps what’s happening from being papered over and forgotten, until change can be made in the right direction again.
Earlynerd on June 10th, 2022 at 00:11
Yep. Today’s post on Sky Dancing is a crystal example of that. BTW, she mentions that she doesn’t like the “tone” of trans critical comments, but doesn’t mention their content. I don’t think she registers the content, just its “tone.” IOW, she’s tone policing, not engaging with content.
The global “airborne miasma” that destroys the neurons needed to understand anything seems to apply to more than just covid precautions.
Branjor on June 12th, 2022 at 11:32
earlynerd, I’ve been meaning to agree with your comment in the last post: god, yes, getting out into the natural world and away from people is a real lifesaver. Now more than ever.
quixote on June 12th, 2022 at 12:07
Branjor, yes, it’s all a bit stupid. On one hand, JJ’s been having a rough enough time without internet randos like me adding to the weight.
On the other hand, what is so hard about the concept that trans people should have the same civil rights as anyone else? And that _nobody_ has any “right” to impose beliefs on others? Having a deep feeeeling of being a woman is just that. A feeling. A belief. Unless, of course, you have a feeling that women truly are cattle who have no rights, not even the ones to self-definition that every other group has. In which case what’s the point of protesting forced birth?
It takes all of two sentences to come full circle, but for god’s sake never mention it. It’s too disrespectful.
What about how disrespectful it is NOT to mention it? If somebody came on with racism or homophobia, wouldn’t it be wrong to let it go? But it’s different when it’s anti-women? How?
So I’m very conflicted. Don’t want to hurt one person on the blog by saying anything. Don’t want to harm a huge class of people by not saying anything.
quixote on June 12th, 2022 at 12:31
Well, finally some good news on the religion vs. women front!
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article262496912.html#storylink=cpy
The Jewish religion comes through again! Calls out the Supremes in favor of women’s rights on *exactly* the same terms the male supremacist Catholics have been using so effectively.
Having a 2000+ year old argument with your supreme being, rather than blind obedience to a weird omnipotent creature with the secondary sex characteristics of one half of a weakly dimorphic species, MATTERS.
Jews have given us women as rabbis, as humans G-d will talk to same as men, and now this.
American egalitarian religions like Episcopalians, Methodists, etc, have all been far too ‘tolerant’ of intolerant beliefs. I’ve been wishing for some time for a woman-supremacist religion that puts men in exactly the same place vis a vis women that Catholics, Mormons, Southern Baptists, Muslims, etc. do, and seeing how American law likes *that*.
Failing such an impossible dream, it would have been great if the egalitarian American Protestant religions had insisted as ferociously on their doctrine as the male supremacist ones have.
But now a religion every bit as much a part of American culture and with an even longer human history than the Catholics has taken this on. This is so very welcome.
Earlynerd on June 15th, 2022 at 01:09
Also – it is amazing how therapeutic just a walk in the woods is.
Or on a deserted beach just at sunset. Or sitting on the shore of a lake with competing bullfrogs, a noisy beaver, a fishing eagle and a huge rising full moon.
This place would be completely out of reach for me financially if it were *not* chock full of tRump lovin, gun totin, intellect challenged rednecks, so there’s that. All of Oregon and most of California would be here in a heartbeat otherwise 🙂
Earlynerd on June 15th, 2022 at 01:23
post roe:
I hope you’ll forgive me taking advantage of your blog yet one more time:
(I’ll try not to be an IBW 🙂 )
When my rights in the U.S. were expanding outward at the rate of the universe *just* as I was coming of age, in the early 1970’s, I remember looking at one of those billboards that flipped each side of a triangle to present a totally new ad, and thinking: Just like that, we have rights. Just like that, we have heros. Because the women’s past I already knew better than 99% of Americans had been momentarily discovered by the mainstream press. That second in America is thoroughly, impeccably documented in Susan Faludi’s Backlash.
Like many hopelessly het girls and young women my age, I was occasionally terrified in those few years between fertility and legal freedom. But nothing compared to my knowledge of what the adult women I loved, starting with my mother but also her sisters and other women in our community, went through from being reduced to farm animals by the Catholic church. The childless males who were then and are now the exclusive rulers of that institution also gave Catholic men one single Hobsen’s choice: treat your partner in life exactly like an animal to be bred or risk your immortal soul. To devout men, this was an impossible choice. The Catholic marriage manual at the time (probably not much changed now) was addressed exclusively to men. Its instructions included “If she does not become pregnant, try moving her legs a little further apart”.
In a city that was like a little New Orleans, with a Catholic community large and rich enough to compete with Protestants, the doctors who would remove a woman’s uterus to save her from being bred either to death or into insanity, were hailed as heros. Our local Catholic hospital had at least one of them. Forcing a woman into early menopause was considered a small price to pay to remove that lethal burden from women.
I will never not hate the Catholic church, first and foremost, but also all the other male supremacist religions, for making the most human, loving, productive relationship – a life long sexual partnership – into the one that is the most deadly for women.
Earlynerd on June 25th, 2022 at 00:51
Well, finally got my post-Roe, post-Dobbs, back-in-the-trenches screed on the blog.
I spend my life seeing visions of another world. All I can think is IF we used this disaster to blanket Jesusland in abortion pills, that would be the end of this particular bullshit forever.
Once technology changes the landscape, you can’t go back to your old flat land. It’s gone.
And maybe this’ll be a big enough dope slap to make that happen. Here’s hoping.
quixote on June 27th, 2022 at 21:51