Kells, I am more than willing to admit that there is a lot I do not understand about the abortion debate. I agree with you that the rhetoric of innocence/culpability is crucial. I am, not sure I understand what you are saying here and to whom the positions adumbrated below are attributed. Are you saying that anti-choice activists have the view that, to put it crudely, it is OK, or anyway less bad, to kill or do awful things to anyone who has any capability for moral respojnsibility at all than to things like fetuses and "nature" which do not? I am not sure that I am aware of antichoice activists who care deeply about the environment, or think that pollution is on par with abortion. Nor do I know of antichoice activists (or, really anyone else) who think that it is OK to execute whose who are innocent of the crimes of which they are charged because they are probably guilty of something bad. Maybe I misunderstand you. I think Yoshie is more on the money when she cast the issue as one of innocent babies/guilty women. The women are seen as guilty because they fucked and probably enjoyed it, very bad, they should be punished; they should not be allowed to go around having random orgasms and killing little children to furthertheir own pleasure. This is a caricature, but a caricature of a mindset that I think is real. Moreover, it connects with what I think is the more important mentality of the majority view, which approves of or tolerates abortions in cases were sex is coerced, but not otherwise, althoughthe fetusesa re equally innocent, in the sense of not having done anything that might deserrve death, whether or not they were produced by rape or incest or by voluntary and therefore culpable sex. In addition to the intellectual problem I have posed in the last few posts, namely, how we pro-choice types can plausibly draw the line at birth, there is a different practical problem. It is this. If Yoshie's analysis is right, winning over a substantial proportion of the people in the middle involves changing people's ideas about the guilty character of voluntary female sex. Here it is unlikeky that rational argument will make any differewnce. We need at the minimumj a rhetorical strategy that will help people come to see and experience female sexuality as innocent and delightful, not dirty and sinful. That will not affect the intellectual logic of the abortion debate. Even innocent pleasures do not weigh much against killing innocent people. So we will still need to answer the first problem. But it would help undermine the political support for antiabortion positions by changing the motivation many people have to support more or less extreme antichoice positions. jks
kelley <the-squeeze at pulpculture.org> wrote:At 07:59 AM 2/1/03 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>although I agree with Doug, Kelly, JennyB, and Joanna that it is a bright
>light litmus test for whether you are a feminist.
I don't think this at all.
What you don't get about those who are opposed to abortion is this--caused I've formally debated someone who was quite rational in his views and he helped me to see this: Innocence, Christian or secularized in Dennis's worldview, is about culpability and power.
What anti-abortionist's mean (whether personally opposed or opposed to abortion on demand as policy) is what Earth Crisis means when they crank on about how nature is innocent.
It is more horrid to kill undead babies, pollute the earth, and eat meat than it is to gun down physicians and blow up hotdog factories. Humans have choice/freedom and, thus, power. Undead babies and nature do not have power.
People who drive cars and then die in automobile accidents make a choice to drive cars. Undead babies did not ask to be conceived. Babies and nature cannot opt out.
People who are executed, even if innocent of the crime they've been accused of, are still not innocent. Most of them have priors and most of them were considered vile people in some other way.
The Iraqi people aren't innocent because, as one man said at another list, "The same is true of the Iraqis. Since they are Iraqis, they "deserve" all the benefits and burdens that accrue to them as Iraqis, including dying for the policies of their dictator leader."
The result is an intolerance of anyone's view but their own, as Dennis has neatly revealed--and without being overtly religious.
Hey Women Slap Kick Ha Ha Ha http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/01/22/notes012203.DTL&nl=fix
At 11:59 PM 1/31/03 -0500, DoreneFC at aol.com wrote:
>Speaking for myself, I think the chameleon effect only goes so far and
>then gets darned tiresome in the bargain. I ran away from home in MT to go
>to college on the east coast. At the time, I thought I had no accent and
>all those Easterners just talked funny. My college friends assured me that
>it was I who talked funny, especially when talking on the phone to MT. The
>on breaks, my high-school friends would razz me about talking like an
>Easterner. (Think of the NYT as your basic schooyard, only maybe better
>dressed.)
:)
I agree, though I identify more in terms of other issues. For instance, I fail to see the difference between Oxford debating society insults and doing the dozens (your mama...) Those who think that, say, the third person interrogative is an acceptable debate tactic are just as incapable of realizing they have an "accent" (metaphorically speaking) as your college friends were incapable of recognizing that they had an accent.
None of this by way of suggesting that there is something noble about trash talk/doing the dozens or something ignoble about not realizing you have an 'accent' (metaphorical or otherwise). But, as you said, 'the chameleon effect only goes so far and it gets damned tiresome in the bargain.'
>So I fixed them all and moved to the southern Indiana for awhile. The only
>lasting thing I got out of that is a "Y'all" I keep around for when I need
>to pretend to speak "hayseed" or when I need a good non-gender-specific
>substitute for "you guys," "youz guys," etc.
>
>And maybe we got no call objectin' to "nu ku lar" on account of Sequim
>(Skwim) WA, Puyallup (PEW all up) WA, and Peru (PEE ru) IN. Doesn't make
>listening to Shrub any more pleasant, but that's a different problem.
Since those pronunciations make sense, I'm not convinced that nukular is analogous. I'm quite prepared to believe that nukular is a regional/rural pronunciation, however. Some people have advanced that claim. That makes little sense in this case since maw and paw say it jiss fine.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that Molly Ivins' background matters in the same way it matters in, say, Boston or the plantation south. Those of us not from Boston don't know how to read the class distinctions between Cambridge and Southie. Those of us not from the South, can't read the class distinctions that people from the South tell me they can read.
As for returning to your roots, I understand this one more than you know.
:) I never knew I was working class 'til I went to grad school.
Sheeeeee-it. I probably never used to say sheeeeeeee-it with anywhere near
the frequency I do now until being treated to some choice forms of class
bigotry. It is always fun to read it here on this list, too.
At 02:52 PM 2/1/03 -0800, Marta Russell wrote:
I don't know Marta, when Thomas thought people were focusing too much on your bimbo comment, then I'd say that there was more than me involved.
>No Hollywood USES volumptous eat me up bodies to sell tickets.
Have you thought about writing a review in which you actually make that argument. In this last one, you were trying to make, uh, "plausible" your speculation that Hayek CHOSE to not have her leg withered by reality. To deny this would be absurd, since your whole point was that someone extinguished polio in this film and it wasn't Taymour, as evidenced by the script. hence, it must be Hayek.
Marta: "It stunned me that Traymor would have agreed to do the film with [Hayek]."
Marta: Hayek is "mostly a body who should be a model for bikini magazines. That is how she portrays herself and that is the reaction that she gets." (does she deserve it?)
I am curious, now that you've learned how hard Hayek worked to get the film produced, would you still say these things about her? Does Hayek's own professed feminism and love of women suggest to you that she deserves your accusation?
Had you really wanted to write about "hollywood" I would have thought you'd glommed on to the fact that the studio was so lookist that they wouldn't even let Hayek wear a mustache so she had to grow her own. But no: It was Hayek's decision.
As for bandwidth, you a size-queen or sumpin'?
I'm a feminist and when people on the left engage in film reviews and list commentary that blame individual women, rather than engage in structuralist analyses, then I criticize their work. I find it very much worth my time. You seem to do the same about your own axe, yes? Extend the same respect to me, instead of trivializing the things I see as important as simply my bizarre inexplicable obsessions.
Kelley
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