Dare To Be A Feminist

I met Antonia Crane when I was putting together an anthology I did about sex work & sex workers. From our first correspondence it was clear she was smart, articulate, funny, talented, ballsy and didn't take herself too seriously. I knew she had a...

The abortion debate is not about unborn babies. I bet you knew that, didn’t you? If it were, there would be a similar outcry over every issue involving the lives of babies. Such as lack of healthcare, babies born addicted to drugs, babies killed after being left in hot vehicles, etc. Every year here in Texas someone leaves a kid in a carseat in 100 degree weather and the kid bakes. No public outcry. No organized protest. In fact, the person responsible usually escapes criminal prosecution.

But do you really know what it is about? The pro-life attempt to criminalize abortion is not about saving the lives of unborn babies. If it were about that, you’d see pro-lifers working toward preventing unwanted pregnancies and better adoption rates of unwanted children. In Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker explains the psychology behind this centuries-old debate.

People generally don’t put a lot of time and effort into an issue unless it directly affects them. So..how are pro-lifers directly affected by the abortions of others?

The abortion debate is about women and their role in society.

As this type of porn gains visibility, it reflects a greater demand for explicit sexual representations among women, where sex isn't always a "ribbon-tied box of happiness and joy," say editors in this excerpt from "The Feminist Porn Book."

...With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people than ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-driven fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society's dread of women who own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, "Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value." Rubin maps this system as one where "the charmed circle" is perpetually threatened by the "outer limits," or those who fall out of the bounds of the acceptable.

On the bottom of this hierarchy are sexual acts and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy and reproduction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the privileging of normative and constricted sexualities and the denigration and punishment of the "sexual rabble."