Girl Talk

I've had almost a month to think about this Hobby Lobby thing. I touched on it for just a second a few weeks ago in the normal way you're no doubt accustomed to reading here, Automated Russian Advertising Bot,* in a cheap throwaway line at the end of an overlong post filling the unnecessary space between (probably) boner jokes.

I'm trying to get through it, admitting of course that case law is not my primary area of expertise. What is my primary area of expertise, you ask? First of all, obviously, very insulted that you had to ask. Clearly it's bringing joy to a world audience through the medium of free internet content posting in a format that died with the last Bush administration.

My second primary** area of expertise? The ladies. Again, totes obvs. I say "totes obvs" because that's the way ladies talk now and I'm totes flu in their ling. Because I understand them on a level few men ever could. Because I was raised by women, almost exclusively. And because I used to be one.

Not biologically, obvs-iously. But I did used to stay home raising children, a job for which I was paid pennies on the dollar compared to what my then-wife was making in her less important job creating semiconductors. In fact it was even more repressive because pennies on the dollar would have been a big fat raise for me. Nope, I took my payment in child vomit and baby tears, with no hope of recuperation or equivalency, right up until the time I started receiving child support and a generous alimony. And stepped into a job almost immediately after I started looking, almost immediately out-earning my female peers. So you know, I've seen it from both sides. I feel your pain. Well, not "feel," but I think I could pick it out of a crowd.

Given my unique gender-transcending wo/man gaze, I see the Hobby Lobby decision and I know what it is saying to you, ladies: eeeease up on the whorin'. That's right, don't sweat the smaller details of who can buy Plan Whatever to pre-murder an unmade baby, blah blah. If you'd just stop being such a wanton slattern, you wouldn't need that particular pill or an IUD or clothes that showed off your ankles. Save up the money you would have spent on thongs and/or vajazzles and use that to buy your slut-pills if you have to. But the cheapest option? Lock it down. Don't be the free-milk supplier. Be the cow.

Even with all my insight, though, I have trouble understanding why women's reproductive rights are such a struggle. Clearly the patriarchy thing is real, with only Penis-American justices voting on the side of the religious preferences closely-held by a conglomeration of merchandise and leased retail space recorded on legal documents. All the ladies on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority ruling, but rarely do women vote en bloc in that way. Which I think is the heart of the issue. Other groups with civil rights issues can organize and mobilize around single issues or people, like the LGBT community or even a population as large as African Americans, as we've seen in the last couple of elections especially.

But women, who are also denied levels of coequal civil rights, can't behave as a minority might because they aren't a minority. Sure, they make up 50%+ of the population and even more of the electorate, but they are being undermined from within by the phenomenon of social and religious conservative women. More than half the men plus a large-enough chunk of women asking (in a very carefully limited and willfully contrarian way) How Would Jesus Vote? tangles up the picture for the electoral success of women's rights as an issue.

And to some level, if I'm really a supporter of women's self-determination, I have to be OK with that. If women want to vote in, as a random unrelated example, sharia law, the point of being a supporter of women's rights would be to say, loudly and definitively, that the principle isn't Plan B or Planned Parenthood, it's exactly that self-determination, no matter who contrary it seems to be on the face of it.

Luckily, as a former woman, I'm also inoculated from the taint of patriarchy, so when I say something like "What are you, fucking crazy with this? Don't you have daughters? How dare you attempt to impose your limited, medieval worldview across an entire population?" it's not condescending man-splanation, it's the honest engagement in an exchange of ideas between two politically indistinguishable human beings. One of whom is totally fucking wrong.

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*the Blogger software very kindly tracks the source of page visits. As far as I can tell, 95% of my readership generates from somewhere along the frontier with Kazakhstan and would like to sell me some very poorly lit porn featuring some borderline-sclerotic models. I appreciate the attempt at reciprocation. And your very dedicated continued readership.

**I can't use "secondary" because we're talking about distinctions without difference here. In terms of laudable personal attributes, these are first among equals. And also second among equals.