In case you haven’t heard, there’s a war on women.
This rhetoric usually refers to a handful of bills in US states which propose limits on access to abortion. Contrary to popular opinion, some people believe abortion should not be as easily and casually used as pre-conception birth control. In a democratic system of government, legislative wrestling over how much or how little unimpeded access to surgical termination of a human embryo is both reasonable and expected.
In response to this, several female legislators, starting with Georgia State Representative Yasmin Neal have introduced legislation to deny men’s access to the pre-conception birth control of vasectomy. The reason stated for this is explicitly totalitarian. According to Neal:
It is patently unfair that men can avoid the rewards of unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgement over such matters is more valid than the judgement of the general assembly, while women’s ability to decide [over the life of an existing embryo] is constantly up for debate throughout the United States. Women, our bodies, and what we do with it[sic] are always up for debate. This bill has been drafted for all women. Who have the wherewithal to chose. The day has come when men should feel the same pressure and invasion of privacy that women have faced for years. I have introduced this legislation because it is the purpose of the general assembly to insert an invasive state interest of reproductive habits of men in this state, and substitute the will of the government over the will of adult men.
The false equivalence between birth control prior to fertilization and conception, and the treatment of the termination of a pregnancy – in which a viable human embryo is killed is likely not lost on Yasmin Neal or her supporters. If men were to “feel the same pressure and invasion of privacy that women have faced for years,” men would first have to have reproductive rights – which to date, they do not. What men do have is a legal onus to financially underwrite a woman’s reproductive rights, in which she legally compels a man to abide by whatever decision she makes over reproduction. Debate over male reproductive rights cannot actually occur until men have such rights, and representative Neal knows this.
In fact, it has been gender ideologues who unilaterally deny men access to basic birth control technology women have enjoyed for a half century. A male contraceptive pill has been feasible for at least a decade. According to Dr. Elsimar Coutinho, a Brazilian endocrinologist and a human reproduction scientist, the male pill is widely used in China. However, in an interview on Brazilian TV, Dr Coutinho explains how when seeking approval for a male contraceptive pill based on natural substances extracted from cotton seeds, he was denied permission at the Budapest World Population Congress.
During his interview Coutinho explains:
In Budapest, I went to try to get the support of women. I thought, if women support it. The American feminists were all there, including Betty Freidan. It was her, I started to speak and in some ten minutes, she interrupted. She said: Dr., do you think we’ve fought our whole lives to have in our hands the decision of having children or not? Do you think we’re abdicating that? Men say they’re on the pill, women believe them? Do you know what you are, what you all deserve? To have credibility, swear you’re using pills just to get laid and leave? Leave us with the responsibility and then ‘the pill failed’ ? I was dazzled, because the women stood up screaming NO MALE PILL!!
I was suprised that women wouldn’t support me.
One of the hosts on the Brazilian television show questioned Dr Coutinho, asking “It was the feminists who rejected the male pill?” and Coutinho replied, saying “[At] the international feminist movement in Budapest, World Population Congress, I was the only scientist to talk. The others were politicians. I went to tell our results which were great. We already had more than 1000 men who had taken the pill, no side effects, etc.”
The show’s female presenter interjected: “I don’t get it, she was demanding to her, or to us [women] the decision on procreation?” Dr Coutinho responds by stating the position of the feminist panel members at the Budapest Population Congress, “WE take the pill, when we want to get pregnant, we stop taking it”.
And that is why the in the “free world” there is no male birth control pill. Because, according to politically connected feminists,“WE take the pill, when we want to get pregnant, we stop taking it.”
This also explains the ideology behind denying men access to the pre-conception birth control of vasectomy. As long as women exercising their “rights” over reproduction can also use the power of the state to appropriate money to pay for their own choices from unwilling fathers, then any encumbrance to this totalitarian system will be painted in the hysterical colors of a “war against women.”
If such a war were real, and not the hyperbolic fear mongering of professional liars then State Representative Neal’s openly declared intention to escalate the inequality of rights between men and women would place herself as serious risk. The fact is that men face ongoing legal disenfranchisement, companied with continued state enforcement of the unilateral legal reproductive rights of women including the imprisonment of men unable to finance baby making they have no rights over.
Although debtors prisons were legally abolished more than a century ago, men are still locked up if they find themselves unable to finance a woman’s decision to reproduce. But if we listen to our media, this is a War Against Women.
The Violence Against Women Act is another area of push-back, after 20 years of a law which governs policing and prosecutions based on a totally discredited model of domestic violence. VAWA turned the real problem of violence within romantic relationships in which men and women abuse each other coequally, in a world of legal fiction in which women were universally innocent victims and men were universally guilty aggressors. While male-on-female abuse is real, it is only a small part of the larger problem domestic violence. However VAWA also incentivized frivolous prosecutions by allocating funds to prosecutors for indictments, regardless of convictions. Now, after 20 years of policing by profiling, where cops follow a script of arrest-the-man-no-matter-what rather than doing actual police work, the public is catching on to this scam, and VAWA faces open opposition in it’s re-authorization.
In addition, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, prior to the Easter weekend repealed that state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law based on the persistent myth of the wage gap. In reality, women on average do earn less over their lifetimes than men. Gender ideologues who have enjoyed an increasing command of public narrative have always claimed that this meant women and men doing the same job were payed differentially based on sex, but this is now, and always has been a lie. The difference in lifetime income is actually just a byproduct of women’s preferences, on average, for employment which affords greater flexibility, greater access to friends and family than the career paths men generally pursue. The wage gap myth has been so thoroughly and so repeatedly debunked that continued public pretence to it is no longer politically viable. Of course, oppositional commentary characterizes Walker’s action as further evidence of the “war on women.”
Omitted from this “war on women” narrative is the department of education mandate for diminished standards of evidence in male-targeting accusations of sexual misconduct in american universities and colleges. Also omitted is the persistent female favouring affirmative action in access and in higher education, despite 20 years of escalating female favouring imbalance in educational outcomes. Even the feminists have noticed this, but rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, systematic male exclusion from higher education is celebrated by professional bigots like Hannah Rosin.
Also omitted from the war on women is the unofficial policy of the courts to fabricate excuses for female criminals – like Amanda Knox, whose bizarre acquittal reveals in human beings a wholly irrational ability to forgive any behavior from a sexually attractive female, including murder. A google search for “woman kills baby” revealed a lengthy list of women acquitted or given suspended sentences for the killings of their own children. When it comes to the behavior of females, there appears to be no limit on violence, murder, or outrageous conduct. However, we are constantly reminded that there is a war on women. How much repetition will it take to convince all of us?
The Obama health care package is another area in which, rather than being sensibly omitted from the constructed narrative of a “war on women” in the few places where women are expected to pay for coverage – the “war on women” screen rings out again. Strangely, in every area where free coverage is offered for women, no corresponding coverage is listed for men.
Breast cancer screening, yes, prostate cancer screening, no. According to reporting by AVfM contributor Anthony Zarat:
..there are also line items for three breast health treatments, with no matching prostate health coverage. There is cervical cancer screening, but no provisions for male specific cancers. There are several line items protecting women from STDs, but no matching money for men.
This is also where mandatory free birth control products and free tubal ligation services for women will be, once the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations are accepted by the president. That approval process led to the fuss over a “war on birth control.” Nobody talks about the fact that birth control for men, including vasectomy, is not covered, not free, and not mentioned in either the IOM or the USPSTF. Feminists and the liberal left are crying foul because a small number of women will have a small number of their female-only services under Obamacare limited. A few women, some of the time, will be treated like all men are treated, all the time. Outrageous!”
So this is the war on women? That women sometimes are treated as men are treated all the time?
Although it would very likely have a salutary effect on the perception of people whose reality is filtered through the lens of mainstream media, I am not bloody-minded enough to wish for a reversal of the imbalance of legal rights between men and women. I lack the necessary cruelty.
In addition, whoever came up with that marketing for this apparent “war on women” wasn’t trying hard enough to get guys like me on board, but after examining what’s behind this war on women, and in spite of the poorly chosen name, count me in. After reading some of the recent, emotionally overblown and free-from-facts attempts at condemnation of the MRM, it’s evident that many commentators of the gender-ideologue stripe are convinced that the movement seeking equal legal rights and recognition of the humanity of men is rising. Our most vociferous detractors are clearly worried that we are winning. In that concern, they are correct.
