I love this photo
I love that the brown girl is all, “RAAAAAAAAWWR!!!!” and the white girl is all, “Um… hi, mom! My friend’s kinda pissed lol!”
Best ever.
[via A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World]
[cross-posted at ABLC]by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 120 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Vagina Outrage
I love that the brown girl is all, “RAAAAAAAAWWR!!!!” and the white girl is all, “Um… hi, mom! My friend’s kinda pissed lol!”
Best ever.
[via A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World]
[cross-posted at ABLC]by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 55 Comments
This post is in: Contraception Clusterfuck, Vagina Outrage
The New Hampshire GOP is all up in your lady business and they aren’t even going to give you a courtesy cuddle.
You see, in order to operate in New Hampshire, Planned Parenthood must have a state contract. And Republicans in New Hampshire have ensured that Planned Parenthood cannot get that contract, thus stripping Planned Parenthood of 1.8 million dollars in state and federal funds over the next two years.
One member of the Council who voted against awarding the contract stated that the contract should be awarded to an organization that doesn’t perform abortions. (All of the abortions performed at New Hampshire Planned Parenthood locations are funded by private donation.) Fantastic, eh?
The culture war continues on the front lines of women’s hoo-has, and a significant casualty of this war on women is that Planned Parenthood Centers in New Hampshire no longer distribute contraceptives:
Planned Parenthood had operated under a limited retail pharmacy license that was contingent on having a state contract, said Steve Trombley, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Two weeks ago, the all-Republican Executive Council voted 3-2 against a new contract that would have provided the organization $1.8 million in state and federal money for the two years starting this month.
Executive Councilor Dan St. Hilaire of Concord, who cast one of the three votes in opposition, said the contract should go to an organization that does not perform abortions. The councilors approved 10 other contracts for family planning services.
The Planned Parenthood contract, which accounts for about 20 percent of its annual New Hampshire budget, would have paid for education, distributing contraception, and the testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. The organization’s abortion practice is paid for by private donations, Trombley said, with audits ensuring no public money is used.
Last year, Planned Parenthood provided contraception for 13,242 patients in New Hampshire, Trombley said. The organization also provided 6,112 breast exams, 5,548 screenings for cervical cancer and 18,858 tests for sexually transmitted infections. If the contract is not renewed, Planned Parenthood will drastically reduce its services, Trombley said. The organization employs 80 people in New Hampshire.
Planned Parenthood treats 52 percent of patients whose care is subsidized by the New Hampshire state family planning program, Trombley said. It provides its services on a sliding scale based on income, with 70 percent of patients paying nothing or near nothing for birth control pills because they earn less than 150 percent of the federal poverty line. The federal poverty guidelines vary with the number of people in a household, with a single person qualifying at $10,890 per year and a family of four qualifying at $22,350 a year.
At the Planned Parenthood center in West Lebanon yesterday, Laura Caravella arrived to pick up her patient file to bring it to a physician. Caravella, a 25-year-old paraprofessional at an elementary school in Vermont, had tried to refill her birth control prescription last Friday and learned she could not.
She said she was concerned about the cost of her prescription without the sliding scale offered by Planned Parenthood.
“Financially it’s really stressful,” Caravella said. “I’m already living almost paycheck to paycheck as it is.”
Stephanie Hiltunen, a 26-year-old who lives in Hanover, said she picked up a monthlong supply of birth control last Thursday, the day before the center stopped dispensing it. But future refills will require an inconvenient trip to Enfield, she said. Hiltunen said she would like to have a child but cannot afford it, and she worries there will be a public cost if contraception is inaccessible to low-income women.
“If they can’t afford to have a baby, then we’ll be paying for them in the long run,” she said.
The center has turned away 20 to 30 patients a day who have arrived to refill their birth control prescriptions, said site manager Amanda Mehegan. She said some women have said they will stop taking birth control because they cannot afford the higher prices charged by pharmacies. Seventy percent of the center’s patients lack private health insurance, she said.
Mehegan said she also worries the denied contract will lead to women with breast and cervical cancer going longer without a diagnosis, both because of direct cuts in funding for examinations and because many women are drawn to the center to pick up their birth control and then receive checkups.
So there you have it. If you live in New Hampshire and you or your lady-partner relies on Planned Parenthood to obtain contraceptives, whether to prevent oopsiebabies or for health reasons (yes! there are women who take contraceptives for health reasons, to regulate hormones and whatnot), you’re SOL my friend.
Shameful.
You know, I was watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall for, like, the umpteenth time, and cracking up at Russell Brand as I often do, and I found myself thinking, “You know, the GOP really does want to be inside me. I don’t know what they are hoping to find in my cave of hope and change, but there aren’t any jobs in there (that I’m aware of) so they need to get to steppin’ out of my lady parts.”
Are you having fun yet?
[via Little Green Footballs]
[cross-posted]by Freddie deBoer| 113 Comments
This post is in: Vagina Outrage
In his recent column, Ross Douthat doubled down on his usual strategy (tactic?) of eliding the central, seemingly irresolvable conflict in abortion and muddying the waters with tangential issues. This time, he talked about sex-selective abortion and how it’s bad because it’s sex-selective (yes) and because it’s abortion (no). He expands on that in a blog post.
the story of sex-selective abortion creates more difficulties — both intellectually and, I would submit, emotionally — for abortion-rights supporters than it does for those of us on the pro-life side of the argument. For one thing, it presents a policy problem: If the right to abortion is a fundamental human liberty, how do you address sex selection without infringing dramatically on the right to privacy?
As far as blog warfare goes, this is a well chosen argument. As far as reality goes, it is as simple as pointing out to Ross that freedom compels us to allow lots of things that we think are bad. I support freedom of speech. I even support the right to say shitty things. I don’t support people saying shitty things. Whatever will I do? Surely this is an unresolvable dilemma that points to fundamental flaws in my ideology!
Except that it isn’t, and it doesn’t. We attempt to prevent behaviors that we want to remain legal the way that we always do, with social conditioning. It’s just as legal now for people to use the n-word as it was in 1950, but there are many, many less people using the n-word now, and thank goodness. We didn’t need to ban it to greatly reduce its use. We made it socially unpalatable to use it, and the social consequences are severe. Behavior does not spring completely from legality, and I’m glad it doesn’t. No civil society could exist if it had no lever to influence behavior other than the law.
Sex-selective abortion is bad. Abortion must remain safe and legal in a free society. Those two statements are no more contradictory than any of the myriad other “X behavior is bad/X behavior must remain legal in a free society” statements. That’s freedom, that’s democracy, those are the wages of liberty.
Update: No, I don’t think people are going to come up to me at a party and ask me what I think about them aborting a female fetus because it’s female. The social conditioning I’m talking about is building a culture that recognizes the equal value of women. That’s called feminism, and liberals have been working on it for decades. People in such a culture would surely choose to abort female fetuses because they are female far less often, without coercion.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 99 Comments
This post is in: Humorous, Vagina Outrage
[This is an old post I thought I’d share with the class. -Not!ABLxx]
********
Wow, really? REALLY? It is 2010 and some asshats at an advertising agency actually greenlit this ad campaign which suggests that a clean vagina is most important for confidence at work? Who the…?? What the…?? Why the…?? How the…?? Where the fuck?!?!
This ad campaign is so unbelievably sexist — so utterly ridonkulous — that I figured it must be a joke. I mean, Summer’s Eve cannot possibly be suggesting that a woman’s stinky vagine may be preventing her from grabbing that brass ring. Not in 2010. Maybe in the 1950s. But not in 2010.
Well, it’s not a joke.
Here it is. Read it, weep, and then go clean your vagina:
Just so we’re clear, here’s how you can be better equipped to ask your boss for a raise:
1. Clean your stinky crotch. Preferably with Summer’s Eve products. If you can’t remember anything else, remember to clean the old axe wound.
2. “Just as important: Be sure to eat a healthy breakfast.” So, first, clean cooch. Second, don’t pig out on donuts and be a big fatty fatterson. And after breakfast, you might want to clean that vagina again. Just to be safe.
3. “Leave early. You don’t want to be late on a day when someone will be thinking about your performance.” I’m not even sure what “leave early” and “don’t be late” mean. Does anyone know what that means? Black women get a 15 minute window, right? BPT is a serious medical condition.1
4. “Go over your calendar from the past year, look through old files and emails. Jot down a list of all your important contributions and accomplishments.” Write down “My vagina is so clean you could eat off it” as your number one accomplishment because let’s face it — nothing else is important.
5. “Bring quotes from higher ups to the meeting, such as “Great Job on XXX Project! You made me look good.” What the hell does it mean to bring a quote to a meeting? What sort of company doesn’t have a formal review process? Are you just supposed to bring a notebook of shit people have said about you? “For a good time call old Stank Crotch.” Should you have your boss’ name doodled in hearts? What the hell? Just… WHAT?! Who wrote this ad?!
6. “Don’t be afraid of silence. Effective negotiation requires using strategic pauses. These valuable moments allow your point to resonate and give you time to gather your thoughts.” Yeah, lady. Shut your sconehole. Quit talking so much. All you do is talk talk talk: “I want a raise.” “I’m doing the same work as Bob but Bob gets paid more than me.” “My vagina is really clean today, would you like to smell it?”
7. “Don’t let the conversation stray or get personal.” Oh heavens to Betsy! Business is business, ladies. Don’t talk about your little crumbsnatcher and how he is principal carrot in the school play. Don’t talk about your feelings or your personal problems. And for the love of Bieber, do not talk about your dirty vagina.
8. “Focus on the things that you’ve done to improve the bottom line. Today it’s about your worth to the company.” It’s also about how clean your vagina is.
So, that happened.
I don’t know who signed off on this and I don’t know who at Woman’s Day thought it was a good idea to put this insanely offensive and sexist ad in a magazine geared towards women.
Don Draper could have come up with something better than this. Back in the 1950s… when women were supposed to be seen and not heard. And definitely not smelled.
1aka CPT.
[via Alternet]
[cross-posted]by Zandar| 89 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Fuck The Poor, Kochsuckers, Vagina Outrage, Assholes
(Hey folks. Zandar here. DougJ and John Cole in their infinite wisdom have allowed me to hit the shiny red self-destruct button fill in for Doug this week. I’ll try not to back the Juice into a ditch. More than like…4 times.)
Up in Wisconsin, Scott Walker yesterday signed the state’s budget into law, among the victims: everyone in the state who doesn’t pull down a quarter-mil a year and women.
Yesterday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed a budget that cuts funding for Planned Parenthood, after pushing the measure through the state Legislature without a single Democratic vote. Planned Parenthood denounced the decision to choke off state and federal funding to nine health centers in small communities that will deny preventative health care to 12,000 women who don’t have health insurance.
That’s state number four where Planned Parenthood has been cut from the table as Wisconsin joins Indiana, Kansas, and my home state of North Carolina in telling tens of thousands of women “Gynecology? Just pour some Tussin on it.” Oh hey, and Walker’s authorized some $800 million in education cuts and half a billion off “unspecified” Medicaid programs too.
At some point somebody has to start asking why red states are so damn eager to deny women basic preventative care like this, other than the Koch Brothers are planning to launch a chain of drive-in women’s clinics, or that they’ve contacted the Bene Tlilax and have axlotl tank technology, or they’re just colossally misogynist doucheknockers. Maybe all three.
Between this and the Wingers defending Wisconsin state supreme court Judge Prosser’s alleged assault of a female judge, I can’t possibly come up with a reason why women aren’t flocking to Wisconsin Republicans.
[UPDATE 6:45PM] And Texas today makes it five red states to defund Planned Parenthood, plus turning Medicaid into a block grant so they kick as many people off the rolls as possible.by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 73 Comments
This post is in: Vagina Outrage, Assholes
I don’t really care about Anthony Weiner one way or the other, but I read the Big Government hit piece yesterday and it pissed me off. (I won’t link that sewer. You’ll have to use your Google-fu.) Then I read this and it pissed me off further.
What is with Breitbart and co.’s seemingly pathological need to target women? First that “It’s not like I was going to rape her or anything” incident in which Breitbart’s crony and protege, James O’Keefe planned to lure CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau onto a boat “filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session.” (And yes, I know that Breitbart took to his fainting couch and called O’Keefe gross and offensive for that unsuccessful scheme, and no, I don’t believe he was uninvolved).
And now the “outing” of a young woman in Seattle for political sport? This is beyond the pale:
As details slowly unfold in the Memorial Day saga of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) social media accounts, which he says were hacked to allow the distribution of a lewd photo via Twitter, the surplus of speculation has been exceeded only by a shortage of firsthand information. Rep. Weiner’s office has trickled out some information, but now, for the first time, the alleged intended recipient of the picture, Gennette Nicole Cordova, is speaking out exclusively, in a lengthy statement to The NY Daily News.
Since the story broke, a pile of circumstantial evidence and rampant speculation,throughout the blogosphere, have all but decimated the presumption of innocence due the Congressman, while details that could be exculpatory have been largely ignored or dismissed.
Some conservative blogs, which I will not link to, have taken to dissecting the tweets of underage girls who followed Rep. Weiner, without redacting their user information (as we did), and without mentioning that these girls were being harassed by the Twitter user who first, and last, noticed Weiner’s tweet in real time. These girls deserve to be left alone, not drawn into a controversy in which they are not even direct parties.
These sorts of Internet goons should be relegated to the digital landfill where porn spam and fake Viagra ads reside. They are sick twisted fucks; sitting behind their monitors, targeting, and harassing women for their own sick pleasure, yet feigning outrage when they themselves feel under attack. Breitbart is a classic case of this sort of behavior. These people have deluded themselves into believing that their behavior is either for some greater good, or justified because “it’s just the internet! GOSH!” Thus they think it appropriate to harass, name-call, leak private information, and otherwise bully their targets. Yet without fail, these goons complain when they are called out for what they are: cowards.
“It’s just the Internet” is not an excuse anymore. It’s not just ghosts in the machine; it’s real people sitting in front of the machine, wondering what the hell is wrong with the other people sitting in front of their machines.
It’s real people like Gennette Nicole Cordova who are being attacked in real life by unknown (m)asses on the Internet.
WeinerGate: Weiners and Assholes on the IntertronsPost + Comments (73)
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 305 Comments
This post is in: Vagina Outrage
Lawmakers in Forest Park, Georgia recently passed a law banning all public nudity, except for live theatrical performances and women who breastfeed infants under the age of two.
Wha!? Really?
I don’t get it, y’all. John Mayer said that our bodies are wonderlands. So why do lawmakers across the country seem so fearful of them? First it was Florida with that “uterus is a bad bad word” business. And now it’s a city in Georgia trying to clamp down on breastfeeding in public.1
What is going on? I thought most dudes love boobs!?
Faced with 200 angry breastfeeding mothers sitting on the City Hall steps, there was only one thing the council manager could do – retreat.
Now lawmakers are set to revise the ordinance, which they said was designed to clamp down on public indecency – but mothers claimed it infringed their right to wean their children when they wanted.
So on Monday around 200 self-styled ‘lactivists’, many breastfeeding their babies, staged a ‘nurse-in’ at City Hall.
Jessica Lister, who organised the protest on Facebook, said she had received dozens of messages of support from across the country.
…
The law, passed two weeks ago by the city council, banned all types of public nudity, but contained an exemption for live theatrical performances and women who breastfeed – but only if their infants are ‘under the age of two’.
Many of the mothers were angry that feeding their babies would be considered ‘indecent’.
Amy Byrd told CBS Atlanta ‘If they’re doing so modestly, what’s the difference between a six-month-old and a two-year-old?’
The women said the ordinance stopped them practising ‘child-led’ breastfeeding, in which the infant determines when they stop having their mother’s milk.
…
City manager John Parker said the city attorney had used the same wording as indecency ordinances used in nearby DeKalb County and the City of Griffin – even though there is no age limit in the state law allowing public breastfeeding.
He told NBC11 council members were now drawing up an amendment to ‘nullify some of these conflicts’, and planned to review the ordinance at their next meeting.
Don’t the coppers have better things to do than confront breastfeeding women and demand to know the age of a toddler? Is this the burgeoning birth certificatification of America? Are we going to require babies to produce their birth certificates so lawmakers can verify whether or not to assess penalties against their mothers?
Although — yep — I guess I sort of see the point. I mean, women aren’t really supposed to be out of the house unattended anyway; far too much cooking and cleaning to do. Why do they even need to be outside at all?
Women can’t be trusted. Women are troublemakers and their rights must be restricted lest they run wild spewing estrogen hither and yon.
By the way, “lactivist” is the best portmanteau in all land.
1 See what I did there?
[via @Archivist on the Twitters]
Anti-Breastfeeding Ordinance in Forest Park, Georgia Angers the UteratiPost + Comments (305)