Trap Law’s

Posted on December 30, 2007

Saw a great blog post today over on ‘Objectify This!’ about the passage of a new TRAP law in Wisconsin; but when i went to leave a comment it wouldn’t let me because i wasn’t logged in… except that there’s no way to register or login on their site. gah! hate that.

anyway. So, since I went to all the trouble to write it out I figured i’d post it up here instead along with a link to the original article. so here it is:

Original Article: You Have the Right to Fewer Choices

If anti-choice legislators *really* wanted to stop women from being “coerced” into abortion they’d support social welfare programs that make it easier for low-income women to afford to be mothers, not place more restrictions on women’s ability to make their own decisions.

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Voltairine De’Cleyre on God and Marriage

Posted on November 21, 2007

I just found a truly excellent article on Voltarine De’Cleyre, one of my favorite modern Anarchist writers. I’ll copy the whole thing here, but I just wanted to pull out one of the quotes and highlight it:

“[T]hat is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest tyranny where a man compels a woman he says he loves, to endure the agony of bearing children that she does not want, and for whom, as is the rule rather than the exception, they cannot properly provide. It is worse than any other human oppression; it is fairly God-like! To the sexual tyrant there is not parallel upon earth; one must go to the skies to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children only to starve and curse and outcast and damn them!”

- Voltairine De’Cleyre

I love this quote on so many levels, for what it says about the institution of marriage as it existed in her time, as a reminder why we should be so utterly and irreconcilably hostile to those who seek to use religious conviction to return us to that time, and as an indictment of the “morality” that those same religious zealots preach.

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Is There Anything Good About Men?

Posted on September 11, 2007

I Just ran across an intersting article that takes a feminist approach to gender and applies it to our cultures understanding of Men. Very cool, something I’ve been interested in for quite a while. It’s called “Is there anything good about Men?“. I thought it was very interesting not only for what it directly says about gender, but because the section that discusses social grouping trade-offs between genders has a lot of relevance for understandings of hierarchy and access.

I definitely don’t agree with all of his arguments or points, in particular I think he’s much to eager to divide the world into neat and even “spheres” and discounts the system bias and even violence that has historically been levied against individuals who wish to operate outside the “sphere” that their cultures have ordained for their gender – ie men who would prefer to operate in what he terms the intimate 1-to-1 sphere and women who would prefer to specialize in the broader networks of “shallower” relationships. Gender is not absolute, after all. Still, he makes some interesting arguments and the evolutionary perspective on gender differences and the idea of biology making tradeoffs between strengths and weaknesses makes sense to me. Take the good, leave the bad. In any case, I’m curious about other people’s reactions to the article, both positive and negative.