Sex and Violence

Now that I have your attention.

I am crazy about Jim Jefferies.  He is Australian, now living in the U.S.  I discovered him when a friend sent me a link to a stand up comedy bit he did on guns.  It is biting, hilarious, and just as relevant today as it was when he first did it.

He also has a filthy mouth.  He happily pushes the limits way past humor.  He has to tone it down for basic cable, but his podcast is something to behold.  It is basically him and a couple of his writers getting drunk and dirty for an hour after the show each week.  The filth is pretty meaningless, just drunken slobber for the most part.  It would be nice if it were funnier, but his political commentary is so brilliant, as is his humor, that I will plow through the pure crap for it.  I don't know many who would.  Even my son has said, Uh, no thanks.

But Jefferies follows a long line of great comedians who pushed the limit.  Lenny Bruce was slightly before my time, but he fought the law for freedom of speech.  George Carlin did it when the zeitgeist welcomed it, and I am so glad he did.

As he branched out from the seven words you can't say on TV, two things happened.  He really exercised his First Amendment right, and in so doing, exercised it for the rest of us.  And he offended a lot of people.

Being a child of the 60's and in full-blown rebellion against parents that would curse at times but tell me it was a sin, I rejoiced in Carlin's literally calling out the hypocrisy.  In my home, "god-damn" was the forbidden swear word, requiring confession on Saturday.  Carlin welcomed sexual curse words into our vocabulary.  It was glorious to be able to toss out a "fuck" back in the day.  Today those dirty words more often are uninspired, about as clever as a burp, but truly tinged with violence.

Today we have a "president" who dismisses his comment about grabbing pussy as locker room talk, and then is celebrated at the annual prayer breakfast.  Granted, you still can't say "shit" on TV.  But Roy Moore very nearly became a US Senator with the religious right fully aware of his pedophiliac past.

I was planning on writing about sexual harassment and women's rights.  But there is the power of words, and maybe we need to start there.  After all, it was a matter of empowerment that African Americans have forced our entire country to say "N-word" instead of, well, you know.  And yet, "bitch" isn't even consistently bleeped on TV.

A staple of Bill Maher's comedy for the past two years has been inviting his audience to join him in calling Donald Trump a "whiny little bitch."  This gets my back up.  And yet, when I searched for the inception of this routine I came up with the funny and ironic "New Rule" in which he turns the stereotypes of women on its head, and applies those stereotypes to the whiner-in-chief.

The most powerful of words, the dirty words, have power because they are sexual.  And they have the potential to twist our morality into knots because our sense of our sexuality is so twisted.

Men who, despite their thoughts and prayers, don't flinch over mass murders, are willing to legislatively rape women in the name of "saving babies."  And women have been willing to let them.  The most logical comparison is of the fight to preserve a man's god-given right to own a gun versus the fight to allow women to control their own bodies.

In the 60's we welcomed those seven dirty words into public life, but began to refer to sex as "making love."  Is sex talk dirty, does it have to be?  And when is it degrading, because it surely can be.  As, for example, when used by the "president."  And what does it do to women, who are still considered the weaker sex?  When is sex talk violent, and when are insults sexual?

#MeToo has us all wondering how afraid men should be about stepping over the boundaries between approach and harassment, sex play and coercion.  I would like to suggest that sexual harassment and assault is the end result of verbal attacks on women that we ignore and/or accept.  If you aren't uncomfortable with Maher calling Trump a "whiny little bitch" you are either a man or a woman who doesn't recognize the power that words have to demean you.  If you don't cringe when you hear men insulted by being referred to as "girls" you are accepting not just that women are physically weaker, but that women are weaker.

The answer is not censorship.  The answer is changing perceptions, refusing to accept stereotypes and insults.  The value of forcing us to refer to the derogatory term as "n-word" (when we are in civil society) may be a constant reminder of how wrong it is, but it also denotes the power that African-Americans now have that they can compel this change.  Sadly, another result is that racists become ever more filled with rage at the imposition on their freedom to publicly display their bigotry; the backlash was destined to happen.  But African-Americans aren't taking it anymore, and that too will be quashed.

Women don't like to fight.  We want to fix things.  This makes us appear to be weak, and people like Congressional republicans and Donald Trump will use us as a battering ram to force their way into power.  On the other hand, they can dog whistle other misogynists by painting those of us who aren't compliant as bitches, you know, like Hillary, Nancy and Elizabeth.

Sexual equality is going to mean a fight.  Our daughters have grown up in a world we thought was safe, but was still fraught with sexual harassment and degradation.  As long as there are laws that establish rules about what is contained within our bodies, men will control us.  And we will be demeaned.

Those dirty words have power.  I am all for the well-placed curse word, but we have to admit that there is violence in sexual language.  It is not just that men in power can "grab pussy," it is that they are so confident in that right that they are happy to tell others about it.  Confronting men who assault women sexually is the beginning; their acts must have consequences.  What we  do as these men are confronted is going to be a long and tangled path.

But we need to first become sensitized to the words, their meaning, and their effect.  Not to censor, but not to ignore.  Indeed, until there are consequences for a man who brags about grabbing pussy, women will be under siege.  Denial of the power of those violent words leaves us vulnerable, and grants permission to men to continue to put us "in our place." 

It is time to let men know that we are the ones who will determine what our place will be.

What's Different About Abortion

As the mad Christians in our nation fight to preserve their right to control the bodies of women, I wonder why it is that we have been -- for decades -- victimized by this plague of anti-democratic, anti-freedom, anti-privacy, anti-women wingnuts.  As those in the LGBT community gain freedom and acceptance, as African Americans insist that their rights are respected by law officers, women continue to have their rights violated and their privacy -- and bodies -- invaded.  Some of the most liberal of our lawmakers deem it success when they reach a compromise that only violates some women.

How can this be, when we are fifty percent of the American people?  How can this be when most of us of reproductive age use birth control, many of us have had abortions, and most of us believe that women have the right to make those decisions privately?

At the heart of this battle for reproductive rights is the right to privacy.  Whether or not women should use contraception or have an abortion is so incredibly personal.  But it has become the center of public debate because at its core it has to do with sex.  This debate is not about safety or even about life.  Pure and simple, this is about forcing women who have sex to bear the consequences.  And the vitriol is so intense that those at the far radical religious right claim that even a married woman must literally carry the burden of the act of sex.  The flights of fancy the anti-abortion brigade have taken to pretend this is about the value of life can easily be discounted by their near-unanimous opposition to gun control, universal health care and nutrition programs.

Why, then, are our forces so much weaker, our anger so readily ignored, our supporters so much more inclined to compromise our rights away?

Why are we not so enraged that we can't be ignored?

For one thing, we are women.  I truly hate to say this, but we have been raised to believe that we should sacrifice for the common good, we should be willing to compromise, even walk away from a fight.

And we have accepted that abortion is a bad thing, to the point where our staunchest defenders are willing to make convoluted arguments about how birth control isn't always used to prevent pregnancies.  We chase around the bizarre false scientific claims, arguing about what a fetus is capable of doing and feeling rather than merely insisting that what is inside of a woman's body is her own business, her own life, and it cannot be made into a separate life with separate rights in any way, shape or form.

We can look to movies and television for a sense of social progress.  It wasn't that long ago that I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of mixed race portrayed without it being a part of the plot.  The same thing has happened with gay couples.  They no longer need to be making a statement about who they are -- they just are.

But when have you ever seen a movie or television program where a character just gets an abortion?  Damn, it happens in real life, why doesn't it ever happen in fiction?  Until it becomes just something that happens, we are likely going to be treating it like a complicated moral dilemma, perpetuating the guilt and shame we have been told we should feel at having to deal with possible pregnancy.  And passing it on to our daughters.

On the bright side, we can go to the fringes and find Amy Schumer, who I saw during a televised stand-up performance outright make a joke about getting an abortion.  I did a double-take, admittedly a little horrified, and then feeling incredibly free. I was in the generation that was liberated by George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" comedy routine.  And yet, in 2012, we watched, stunned, as a Michigan representative was barred from debate after saying the word "vagina" on the House floor.

We certainly need to change the way we talk about our bodies and about abortion.  But I don't think that that is the main reason we continue to struggle with winning back our freedom.

Abortion is a temporary condition.  This makes it essentially different than sexual orientation or racial heritage.  And, despite the crazy talk by the right wing, nobody wants to have an abortion, any more than a person would want to have a tooth extracted.  Pregnancy is a condition that has a beginning and an end.  We may look forward to or dread being pregnant, we may delight in our pregnancy or it may make us ill.  But it is still not our identity.  So when we decide to have an abortion, that too happens and becomes the past.  If we have not been burdened by the taint of the abortion mythology, we are able to get on with our lives, as with any other medical process.

So when we won the right to reproductive privacy, we got on with our lives, naively assuming the courts had spoken and it was now law.  We didn't look back, and our daughters did not grow up with the fear and dread of an unwanted pregnancy.

And now we must go back to assuming that we are losing that right.

And we don't want to either lose it, or have to fight for it.

That, I believe, is the essence of why we are losing the abortion war.