Women’s Rights and Personhood: Reframing the Abortion Debate

Social justice issues often suffer from a crisis of framing.  Whether it’s “welfare queens” versus “working poor,” “lazy Injuns” versus “colonialism,” or “special rights” versus “marriage equality,” how an issue is presented has massive effects on the perception of what’s at stake, and what the people on each side are actually trying to achieve.  Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the battle over abortion rights.  While advocates for marriage equality have largely succeeded in making sure the public understands that the fight is for marriage equality, and that what’s at stake is increasingly out-of-touch religious groups’ influence on American politics and people’s right to visit their loved ones in hospitals, too many people have seriously borked ideas of what the abortion debate is about.

A lot of people think it’s about babies.
A lot of people think it’s about sex.
A lot of people think it’s about birth control.
A lot of people think it’s about religious freedom.

And it’s about all those things…just not in the way that most of those people think it is.

What it absolutely, utterly, unequivocally, ineffably, undeniably, explicitly, and totally is NOT about is “life.”

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Women’s Rights and Personhood: Reframing the Abortion Debate
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Shifty Lines: The Persosphere

I’ve often likened 21st-century American policy toward southern Asia to a game of darts, with Iran rightly wondering if it’s supposed to be the bullseye located directly between Afghanistan (invaded 2001) and Iraq (1990 and then 2003).  Both invasions are the multi-generational clusterfucks that they are in large part because they proceeded without a clear knowledge of the forces at work in the region and of the historical legacy that set up, and continues to set up, the endemic strife of the land between the Mediterranean and India.  With the United States insistent on rattling sabers at Iran even while recognizing that attacking the Shia theocracy would be an even worse idea than its 2001 Leroy-Jenkins-charge into the “graveyard of empires,”  it seems prudent to have a look at the on-the-ground reality of the Persosphere.  This level of realism hasn’t been lost on professional analysts of the region, including the one who produced this impressive map of what the Asian Middle East might look like if its borders more closely reflected ethnic and cultural realities.  Hilariously, various conspiracy-minded peoplefrom throughout the Middle East now harbor the delusion that the United States has the partitioning of their states among its objectives, thanks to this speculative map.

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Shifty Lines: The Persosphere

Adversarial Sexism in Hispanic Culture

Machismo.
That’s pretty much all one needs to know about how Hispanic culture deals with women. 
Men have to be macho: bold, loud, fiery, presumptuous, domineering, absolutely certain about everything, and sexually insatiable.  He has to take every chance he can to touch women who strike his fancy, with only the barest pretense of caring whether she approves.  Romance is a distant third priority to raw sexual passion and maintaining a sense of unequal power in as many of his relationships as he possibly can.  Any man who doesn’t enthusiastically exhibit all of those traits isn’t worthy of the term.

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Adversarial Sexism in Hispanic Culture