Intersectional look at some of the Free-Amina protests

A few things upfront:
a) This is a post about FEMEN. Therefore, there will be boobs. Don’t do what I did, and look at the below pictures while in class. :-p
b) FEMEN has an undeserved reputation as sex positive because they call themselves “sextremists” and are using their naked bodies to protest. However, apparently they don’t think that the right to do with your body whatever you want extends universally: they are supporters of the Swedish Model, for example. In fact, at least one of the Free Amina photos on their site is against the background of a self-portrait-mural in which one woman holds up a sign saying “not a sex toy” and has “no prostitution” written on her chest. So yeah. Fail on that account.
c) A lot of the comments on FEMEN’s site are assorted attempts at dismissing the protesters as sluts, whores, etc., which gets mostly ridiculed and aggressively defended against on their page; that I think shows that their “sextremism” style activism has a place, in the same way that the aggressive New Atheist style of defending the right to be openly atheist does. But that doesn’t mean that either is unproblematic, or that either fits every issue and every context.
d) There were other noteworthy instances, posted in other places on the internet, but I really just wanted to work with the images FEMEN had on their facebook, and pull out a couple interesting examples. Otherwise, this post could have gone on forever.
e) All pictures are from the FEMEN facebook page.

Alright, let’s get to the actual point of this post:

1) Activists got into a closed conference at the Institute of Arab Culture in Paris, where the president of Tunisia was giving a presentation:The target here is directly relevant: The Tunisian government is absolutely co-responsible for Amina’s disappearance, and is part of the problem she was protesting against in the first place. On the other hand, none of the pictures I’ve seen showed the activists having anything Amina-related written on their bodies, making this appear far more generically anti-Islam, and not primarily pro-Amina.

2) Free Amina protesters in Berlin climbed a fence and took photos of themselves in front of a mosque, holding signs:Muslims make 5.4% of Germany’s population. Anti-Muslim xenophobes make anywhere from 21% (wouldn’t want to have Muslims as neighbors) to 58% (believe that Muslims’ rights to practice their religion in Germany should be considerably limited). So I’m thinking a bunch of Germans trespassing on private property of a targeted minority might not exactly send the right message; plus, what did that random mosque have to do with Amina?
One of the women in this action is of Arab descent, and had “Arab Women Against Islamism” written across her front. A number of the other protesters had directly Amina-related things written on their bodies. That reads like solidarity with Amina, and with Arab women in general.

3) A large group of activists protested near the Tunisian embassy in Paris, got arrested for their effort:Two pictures this time, because the visuals of that protest were amazingly evocative of suppression of women’s right to speak up (especially the first one). Images like this are why I think the FEMEN style of protest can be quite powerful; but primarily, it is powerful in exactly this way: speaking to the right of women to express themselves.
The protesters gathered near the Tunisian embassy, a clearly understandable connection to Amina’s plight; they also had Amina-related things written on their bodies, and a number of them had stylized portraits of Amina in her now-famous photo on their backs. This could be very easily read as solidarity with Amina.
The wider context of having this protest in France could potentially muddle some of the clarity of the message. Protesting for the right to naked boobs in public spaces in a country that banned veiling in public spaces might not read as “freedom” so much as “freedom to be like us”; not quite the same thing.

4) Many Middle Eastern/North African women also participated in the Free Amina protests (pictures from FEMEN, grouped together by me for easier viewing): The women in the pictures are Egyptian, Iranian, Moroccan, Algerian, and Bahraini; at least one of them is a Muslim. All their messages refer to Amina. In all these cases, their actions directly attack a form of oppression they themselves are subject to.

5) One more from France. French-Arabic women protest in front of a mosque, burn Salafist flag. As with the German protest… why this particular mosque? That point aside, this protest of Arab women, including one Tunisian FEMEN member, standing up against their oppressors is a powerful statement; that image is a powerful visual of that fight against one’s oppression. This too looks less like a pro-Amina rally, but given the context, it’s noticeably in solidarity with her: Arab women fighting together against common oppressor.

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bonus screenshot — a piece of advice: if you don’t want to look like you’re just being ignorantly islamophobic, it would help to do a basic google search before going out to protest:

The WSJ has opinions on non-rich folks again

Donald J. Boudreaux and Mark J. Perry at the Wall Street Journal would like you to know that the shrinking middle class is a mean and “spectacularly wrong” progressive trope; or rather, a “progressive” trope. Scare quotes are apparently necessary (link). Wanna have a look at their arguments?

First, the CPI overestimates inflation by underestimating the value of improvements in product quality and variety.

The what now? Variety I can understand, because increased variations on the same crap are how this consumer economy works. But how is making Planned Obsolescence into a basic production model, and how is lowering quality of products so they can be sold at a profit at Walmart an “improvement in quality”?

Would you prefer 1980 medical care at 1980 prices, or 2013 care at 2013 prices? Most of us wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.

1980′s care I can pay for, vs. 2013 care I can’t? Yeah, let me think about that one.

Asides from that, it’s complete BS that the increase in costs has anything to do with the increase in quality, since the US does not in fact have the best healthcare in the world, yet has the most expensive healthcare in the world. Quite the contrary, the US is below average in many aspects of healthcare as compared to other OECD countries, while at the same time spending 2.5 times the OECD average on healthcare costs. And many of the procedures cost more than in other countries, as well:

And lastly, it’s not actually relevant that current care is more technologically advanced. A middle-class by definition should be able to afford a middle-level of care, regardless of its level of advancement.

Second, this wage figure ignores the rise over the past few decades in the portion of worker pay taken as (nontaxable) fringe benefits. This is no small matter—health benefits, pensions, paid leave and the rest now amount to an average of almost 31% of total compensation for all civilian workers according to the BLS.

You mean the ridiculously more expensive healthcare makes up a larger chunk of a paycheck? Shocking. Also, pensions are rarely pensions anymore, they’re 401k, which just became nearly worthless during the world economic crisis, regardless of how much money people put into them.

Third and most important, the average hourly wage is held down by the great increase of women and immigrants into the workforce over the past three decades. Precisely because the U.S. economy was flexible and strong, it created millions of jobs for the influx of many often lesser-skilled workers who sought employment during these years.

You can tell this is ass-backwards bullshit by the part where women are unskilled workers (the impressive sexism of that aside for a moment). The reality is once again the opposite: jobs entered into by women have become de-skilled as they entered them.
Aside from that… when a job that used to be a highly trained union job, but is now classified as a low-skilled non-union job, that means fewer middle-class jobs. When these jobs disappear entirely, and are replaced by non-unionized, unskilled service industry jobs, that’s once again fewer middle-class jobs. It’s not the magical appearance of uneducated wimmins and furriners that is causing this shift of the US workforce. It’s the lack of affordable education, de-skilling, and de-unionizing of jobs that did that; and those jobs were then filled by people entering the workforce, including women and immigrants.
And on the note of “unskilled labor”… you know what an easy solution to that problem is? Providing training and education for said labor; another thing that’s increasingly hard to come by, because education is becoming more expensive, because apprenticeships for union-jobs are becoming scarce, and because ever higher levels of education are required for ever lower-skilled work.

Since almost all lesser-skilled workers entering the workforce in any given year are paid wages lower than the average, the measured statistic, “average hourly wage,” remained stagnant over the years—even while the real wages of actual flesh-and-blood workers employed in any given year rose over time as they gained more experience and skills.

apparently only people who’ve been in the middle-class in the 1980′s count. O.o
Dudes, having a larger proportion of people in poverty jobs by definition shrinks the Middle Class.

No single measure of well-being is more informative or important than life expectancy. Happily, an American born today can expect to live approximately 79 years—a full five years longer than in 1980 and more than a decade longer than in 1950.

which is also still below OECD average, by a whole year. It also rose slower than in other OECD countries, and slower than in the 40′s, 50′s, and 60′s. But once again, this doesn’t actually tell us shit about the Middle Class, since this is an U.S.-wide average. What might tell us something about the situation of the Middle Class is the fact that the life expectancy gap between the poor and the rich is growing; and unless we assume that the rich have gained enormously and/or poor people are dying much younger at much higher rates, the most likely explanation is a shifting of people out of the middle-ground. You know, a shrinking middle class.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life’s “basics”—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

I notice that housing, education, and healthcare are not listed.

while income inequality might be rising when measured in dollars, it is falling when reckoned in what’s most important—our ability to consume.

consumption is what’s most important?! *barf*

Despite assertions by progressives who complain about stagnant wages, inequality and the (always) disappearing middle class, middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before.

Considering the ridiculous degrees of indebtedness of Americans, this is a horribly callous thing to say. And kind of wrong, since increased debt accounts for the increased consumerism; it’s not an indicator of Middle-Class-ness.

They [...] have much greater access to the services and consumer products bought by billionaires.

like 1st class education, 1st class healthcare, protection from volatile energy prices and increased natural disasters? Oh, that’s not what you meant, is it. You meant gadgets. Oh well then: since both Bill Gates and a college student can afford an iPad, that must mean the Middle Class isn’t shrinking. WTF?

Incidentally, I looked at income distribution in the U.S. in 1980 and 2010. in 1980, median income was $44000; in 2010, it was $49000. The percentage of people living in neighborhoods between 80% and 125% of that median shrunk in that time from about 55% of the population to just over 40% of the population.

Looks to me like the middle segment of income earners in the U.S. shrunk. Huh.

Think Progress gets something wrong

couple weeks ago, The article Idaho Lawmaker Compares Abortion To Prostitution* appeared on Think Progress. It’s in the style of their many other “Republicans say outrageously horrible things” articles, but I think they screwed it up this time.

Mind you, saying that “Prostitution is a choice “more so than an abortion would be [...] Because (in an abortion) there’s two beating hearts. And then there’s one” is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Both are choices about one’s bodily autonomy, and consequently neither is more of a choice than another. Aside from that, these two issues have little to do with each other though, as one is a medical procedure, and another is a form of making money. So the Republican in question, State Rep. Ron Mendive from Idaho, was definitely being a fuckweasel and talking out of his ass. And being anti-choice, which one wouldn’t know from reading the Think Progress articl, because the article never mentions that rather salient point. And then, the article also buys into incredibly toxic narratives about sex work, to boot. The writer of the article, Annie-Rose Strasser, introduces Mendive’s comments as follows (emphasis mine):

Presenting abortion and prostitution as cavaler [sic] choices women make and ignoring the real danger of sex slavery, State Rep. Ron Mendive (R) elicited “audible gasps” on Wednesday during a meeting with representatives from the group, which later condemned his comparison

As far as I can tell, dude was talking about prostitution, not sex slavery. Those are two entirely different things, and conflating them like that is toxic bullshit. Besides, how does it help victims of actual sex slavery for prostitution to be illegal? How does it help to criminalize that which the enslaved folks are being forced to do against their will? doesn’t that merely criminalize the victims? Also, I don’t know about “cavalier choices”. I can’t find a good source for what the dude actually said, but he seems to have talked in general about a “double standard” where abortion is seen as a choice, but prostitution isn’t. That’s not saying they’re “cavalier choices”, it’s just saying they’re choices. And I’m afraid that he’s kind of right about this: there is a double standard. And since the Think Progress article doesn’t provide the context of this comment, it’s hard to tell whether what he said was outrageously shitty or not. If he argued for legalization of prostitution on the basis of bodily autonomy, then he’d be right. If he was trying to argue that both should be illegal, he’d be a toxic assface. But that isolated quote, by itself, is simply true.
And then there’s a quote by one of the ACLU folks about this comparison:

He was correlating a criminal action with something that is constitutionally protected. Those are two completely separate issues,

ok, they’re two completely different issues, but not because one is legal and one isn’t. Comparing legal and illegal things is how you figure out whether something should remain illegal or not (see for example alcohol vs weed comparisons). Now again, the article doesn’t provide the context of this speech**,focusing more on the outrage than on actually reporting details that would show why that comparison is supposed to be so outrageous. It simply assumes that the comparison is outrageous per se, not because it is being used in an outrageous argument that both should be illegal to undo the double standard. If he had instead argued that prostitution should be legal because it’s also about the freedom of choice about one’s body, he’d have a point***.

So my complaint about this article is twofold: for one, bringing sex slavery into this is irresponsible. It’s very similar to arguing against weed by arguing that it may lead to driving under the influence. For two, writing an article as if it should be obvious that a comparison like that would be a Todd Akin moment regardless of context is false and irresponsible. There are contexts in which arguing that there exists such a double standard is indeed perfectly valid. So the context should have been included, the context being that he’s an anti-choicer who was trying to argue that giving women choices leads to horrible things; like abortion, or prostitution.
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*the url ends with /idaho-sex-slavery/ which… um… no. O.o
**the RHealitycheck article it links to does though. Despite being much shorter, it actually bothers to show WHY his argument was outrageous, by including the context. THAT is how the article should have been written.
***granted, that would be an amazingly weird thing to argue for a Republican, but we’re supposed to be upset at what he said; and for that, you need to show why it’s supposed to be upsetting, ffs.

Of wedding rings and red herrings

The NYT has published an article bemoaning inequality; which would be great if it didn’t basically amount to: “if those silly women would just marry, most of their problems would go away”.

Mind you, I don’t dispute that unmarried women are generally hit worse by the ravages of the US economy (and incidentally, so are single fathers), nor that being unmarried seems to cluster in economically poorer social strata. However, the article is being ignorant and/or dismissive of systemic problems it even mentions (that dropping out of college tends to result in lower income; that having inadequate and expensive child-care makes things worse for those who need it more often; that hourly workers are massively underpaid in the US; that workers can’t get paid sick-leave even for severe injuries/recovery from surgery; that in the US, extra-curricular activities for kids cost and arm and a leg, and due to lack of safe public transportation, require a parent who can shuttle said kids to said activities; etc.), in favor of pointless hand-wringing about moral decay, lack of “marriageable men” in lower economic strata*, and other similarly moralistic complaints.
It uses such deeply problematic lines** as “their odds were not particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends” to imply that if only people married right away, things would get better; as if it weren’t equally well-known that single-parenthood is actually healthier than the sort of extremely conflict-ridden marriages that would have resulted if all those couples that had split up had married instead and had insisted on “staying married for the children”. Bonus for whining about “children from multiple men”, despite the utter insignificance of that to the issue at hand; after all, being a single mother because one dude left you is not objectively better than being a single mother because several of them did (and I’m NOT touching a couple other possible reasons why a woman might have children by multiple men).
Another doozy: “Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns”. Well that’s nice. 40 years ago, unions weren’t almost dead yet, minimum wage was higher, economic exploitation of workers was less, education was cheaper. All of this is far more relevant than whether people are married. And I know this because Sweden has a marriage rate lower, and an out-of-wedlock childbirth rate higher than the USA, and yet, inequality is low and children aren’t “doomed” to anything. Trying to guilt-trip women about their single-parent status by blaming their poverty on their singleness is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

Anyway, the article keeps on mentioning class and educational differences at childbirth, but it insists on focusing on marriage instead of getting women educated and providing better childcare services and worker protections. Why? Because writing about responsible social policy is a snooze compared to slut-shaming; which is why we get conclusions like this: “That is the essence of the story of Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Schairer. What most separates them is not the impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin”, when in reality what separates them is that one has a college education and a salaried job, while the other is an hourly worker with a community college degree; and a special needs child.

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*Classism and promotion of toxic masculinity FTL.
**Another favorite: “Ms. Schairer has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting.” Hm. Might that ‘why’ have something to do with the kind of “single motherhood = teh ebil” atmosphere that makes women cling to seriously flawed men because the alternative seems even worse?***
***And since I’m quoting depressing signs of sexism making people’s lives harder, read this exchange and weep:

“I’m not the only boy anymore; we’re going to do boy stuff!” Ms. Schairer recounts him saying.
“What’s boy stuff?” she asked.
“We’re going to play video games and shoot Nerf guns and play Legos,” he said.
“We do that now,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’re not a boy,” he said.

A kitteh and a link dump

I was going to write a post using most of these, but I changed my mind. Still, the links are informative reading, so I’m just going to post them without the article that was supposed to go around them. And just to make the post more than just a dry linkdump, here’s a picture of Dusty:

Not a safe space — a good 101-level explanation of what the term “safe space” even means.

Michigan Legislators Demand Control of the Organ Which Must Not Be Named — summary of what thedrama in Michigan, with summary of the effects of their anti-woman bill

Chicago Police misclassifying trans women of color in the sex trade as “johns” in its “end demand” initiative — article on how the police manage to turn a anti-procurers-of-prostitution campaign into a campaign to arrest, out, and shame poor trans women of color

Despite The Evidence, Anti-Choicers Persist in Lying About Emergency Contraception — article by Amanda Marcotte about something I’ve been saying repeatedly: the science has already shown that hormonal contraceptives, including Emergency Contraception, doesn’t cause implantation failure.

Respect as it applies to anti-harassment policies — A conference organizer states his opinion about the relative importance (or lack thereof) of whether anti-harassment policies will make it harder for people to get laid.

My comments on the American Atheists racefail; and their defenders

So you made a sign highlighting a pro-slavery line, with an old image of an African slave, to make an argument that African Americans should reject Chistianity because it supports their enslavement?

Well, isn’t that just fucking cute. I thought you knew that all Christians cherry-pick their bibles, since that book is so contradictory it’s absolutely impossible to follow all of it? And if you knew this, why the fuck would you think that African Americans would recognize that line as in any way relating to their Christianity? And as a consequence, why do you think they’ll consider you relevant to their lives, if you’re attacking something that isn’t part of their flavor of Christianity, while using the struggle of their ancestors as a rhetorical tool without any visible sign that you are also engaging with the struggles that are part of their everyday experience?

Let me explain:
Sure, many African Americans won’t care either way about this sign; some might even agree with the message, and that the message you meant to send was the one that’s being received (but those would have agreed with you before, so you’ve just wasted a fuckload of money to preach to the choir). But many don’t see it that way. Many members of the African American community don’t see their religion reflected in that quote. What they do see, however, is a billboard that ambiguously declares that slaves should obey their masters; one that could, in almost exactly the same design and wording, be run by a white supremacist organization as supporting black slavery, rather than repudiating religion. What they might also perceive is a stereotypically white organization using them as a rhetorical device, instead of seing them as real people: they won’t see atheist organizations helping their friends who got in trouble with the racist cops (the churches do that); they won’t see atheist organizations helping kids in neglected urban neighborhoods finish school (churches do that); they won’t see atheist organizations fighting voter-registration laws that disenfranchise them (churches do that); they won’t see atheist getting together to make sure members of their communities who have lost their homes find shelter (churches do that); but they will see atheists using the struggles of their ancestors for cheap point-scoring.
So, they will conclude that atheists are racist; that they are unconcerned with the actual lives and struggles and beliefs of African Americans, and instead just want to score rhetorical points.

Do you think that will convince the doubting and the closeted atheists to break their ties to the churches and join an atheist organization? really?

Oh, you say that’s not at all what you were trying to say with that billboard? That you didn’t mean any of what I just “read into” your billboard? Tough shit. Advertising (and that’s what you’re doing when you put up a billboard; you’re advertising yourself) is not about you. Why do you think companies shell out ridiculous amounts of money on customer-data? It’s because advertising is about your target audience, not about you. You want an effective message? You have to put in the bloody effort of researching what issues are perceived as relevant by that target audience; you have to make the effort to understand the cultural, historic, and socioeconomic context in which your message will appear, so that you can understand how to create one that will be read the way you want people to read it. Because it’s your fucking responsibility to make yourself understood. Because intent isn’t magic; not in any form of communication, but especially not in advertizing. If you don’t want to do that, if you’d rather whine about people misunderstanding and criticizing you than put in the required effort and research your target audience, then:

stay the fuck out of advertising, and stay away from demographics you are not part of, and thus lack any useful knowledge about.

**EDIT: and, in case this is unclear to some of the troglodytes who stumble upon this post: a failure to do the relevant research yet assuming that you can get your message across anyway is a manifestation of privilege (in this case, racial privilege); and the public recognition of and involvement with African Americans only when it’s rhetorically useful to score points against religion is just plain racist, because it erases them and reduces them to rhetorical devices; and because it ignores their perspectives by making an argument from a dominant (in this case, white) perspective even when the target audience is an oppressed minority (in this case, the African American community)**

**Post inspired by (and partially paraphrased from) this post by Sikivu Hutchinson, as well as the massive outbreak of stupid in this thread on Pharyngula**

And now, for shits and giggles: Fox News and Geography

images compiled by Media Matters

Link dump

there’s a few issues on my mind that don’t need a lot to have said about them (or, you know, render one completely speechless), so I’ll just collect them all here:

1)douchebag: now an insult also applicable to racists: Hey Did You Know Your Vagina’s Personality Is Based On Your Race?

2)something that’s quite old by now, but that I haven’t gotten around to respond: Walton linked to an article about a boy in London fighting the ban on cornrows in his school. The ban was being defended because it bans things associated with gang-culture. Someone else commented that it was “unprofessional”. That reminded me of how political black people’s hair is: how much racism there is in associating traditionally black hairstyles with criminality, and how much shaming there is (usually of women) for their natural hair, to the point where many of them end up damaging it to make it look like white people’s hair. Anyway, here’s a good article from the guardian about it: Cornrows? Non-traditional? What rubbish

3)News Corp trying to shut up critics, in a way that vaguely reminds me of something a certain someone recently did… News Corp’s Times Of London Cartoon Shows Starving Children Bemoaning Phone-Hacking Scandal Coverage

4)Limbaugh claims that current heatwave is a Liberal Conspiracy: Limbaugh: The Killer 116° Heat Index Is ‘Manufactured By The Government’

5)Sustainable development that’s actually sustainable: Permaculture in Cambodia (30 min documentary)

EDIT: one more, for good measure: Fox News: Are There Really Poor Americans?, from The Young Turks

Homework-blogging, episode one

since my brainpower is completely taken up with working on these class-papers, I figure I should repurpose at least a few of them for blogging; at least the ones from my Social Inequality class, since they’re relevant to my blogging in general. So, here’s the first one.

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Planned Parenthood in the Media: Dividing Gender and Class issues

The Media have become one of the biggest influences on how we perceive and interpret the world. In terms of the Dimensions of Oppression discussed by Patricia Hill Collins (2011, pp. 763-768), it has become an important social institution, as well as a producer and distributor of the symbols that create the Symbolic Dimension of Oppression. This is true both in its fiction as in its non-fiction: in his essay “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible”, Gregory Mantsios describes the ways in which the Poor and the causes of their poverty are disappeared and distorted in the Media in their news programs. These are narratives that create strong symbols and dichotomies between “them”, the poor and “us” the wealthy.

Most of the time, the poor don’t show up in the news-media at all, even if the issue under discussion affects them or relates to them in some way., because the story is written from an “us” perspective, and the “us” are middle-class and wealthy people. And if the poor are mentioned in the media at all, they’re usually either blamed for their condition, considered undeserving of help, or considered a problem to “us”.

Currently, the importance of the news media as a symbol-making institution is best represented by the way the issues surrounding a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood are being presented in the news, and how that presentation shapes any discussion and defense of Planned Parenthood is being held in society. Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that provides various services to women, and it discounts them or even provides them for free for low-income women. It also provides some services to men (cancer screening and STD treatment and diagnosis, for example), which are similarly discounted for poor men. On February 11th, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of banning all federal funding for the organization. The media and politicians have been discussing this event in one of two ways, either focusing on abortion and women’s sexuality, or on fiscal responsibility that requires cutting the budget. An excellent example of that framing is evident in Judson Berger’s article from February 5th, in which he writes “Republicans are trying to juggle the abortion issue as they wage a separate, and more high-profile, battle in Congress over spending.” Another article on CNN.com mentions that proponents of the ban are saying that current restrictions on abortion funding aren’t enough because “applying the government’s money to other procedures leaves more of the group’s own cash on hand to allocate to abortion-related services”. The same article says that the cuts are “part of a continuing resolution that included dramatic spending cuts across a range of programs” (Political Ticker, 2011). In other words, the media uses the symbols of an innocent, righteous, and victimized “us” (the middle class, the men, the “morally responsible” women) who are being asked to shoulder an ethical and financial burden on behalf of a “them” (the non-taxpaying poor, sexually irresponsible women) that is demanding an unethical service to be provided from “our” taxpayer money, even though they brought the problem on themselves (see Mantsios’ “The Poor Have Only Themselves To Blame” narrative, p. 95) and who are undeserving of help because of their immoral behavior both in terms of what led to their situation and the service they demand (Mantsios’ “The Poor Are Undeserving”, p. 94). The best example of this particular line of argument could in fact be seen when Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) debated the defunding of Planned Parenthood, as broadcast on C-SPAN and distributed on the internet via YouTube and MediaMatters: his argument for defunding Planned Parenthood was that “they” were “invested in promiscuity” and that “we” needed to “stand on principle” and not fund them. The narratives are those Mantsios describes as being used against the poor, but in this case they are strengthened, in terms of the othering they do, because they’re used for not one but two of the opressive categories identified by Collins: class and gender. The othered aren’t just undeserving and guilty poor, they are undeserving and guilty poor women, making the “them” an even smaller, even more marginalized, and even more easily ignorable group less likely to be in any way connected to “us” and “our” problems and needs.

The fact that Planned Parenthood is a health-care provider for the poor for such things as cancer screening, UTI treatments, and even diabetes testing is not mentioned in either article. Neither is the fact that the tax-burden is minimal, and that tax-payers themselves often either use their services themselves, or have within their communities people who do. The effects on the health of those people from various backgrounds who might now lose access are ignored entirely by the Media coverage of the discussion. No mentions are made of what will happen to people from a wide section of the population, including plenty of people belonging to the “us” category (middle-class students, married women with children, men who go for cancer testing) if clinics have to close, or if they won’t be able to provide their services at reduced cost or for free any longer. These realities have been excised from Media discussion in favor of the negative, dichotomous symbolism.

Understanding the narratives Mantsios describes can help see past the narratives trying to frame people who use Planned Parenthood as “the other”. But that alone is not enough, because Mantsios essay focuses only one one dimension of oppression, i.e. class, while the issues surrounding a defunding of Planned Parenthood involves both class and gender oppression.

Patricia Hill Collins’ essay “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis” can help broaden the perspective and make it possible to understand the issues surrounding Planned Parenthood not in terms of divisive “othering” and entrenched interests, but rather as an issue that spans the different dimensions of oppression. This may enable people to look at the services Planned Parenthood provides as being beneficial to people in all sorts of different groups, groups that maybe wouldn’t otherwise be able to see each others as allies in the provision and maintenance of health-care access. Her suggestion of how to find new ways to conceptualize race, class, and gender away from dichotomous either/or categories that classify someone as either oppressed or oppressor(2011, p. 762) can help feminists fighting for women’s reproductive rights see poor men and conservative charities for the poor not as oppressors withing the Patriarchy, and conversely can help organizations trying to help the poor see middle-class feminists not as oppressors within the class-structure. Similarly, her description of how to transcend the barriers that were erected in identity-politics by splitting people into distinct categories by race, gender, and class and form alliances on common causes(2011, pp. 770-771) provides useful advice on how to overcome social and cultural differences of opinion on issues that divide people, in order to make it possible for all of them to work together on issues that they share in common. Her example of a inner-city school in which people from all sorts of different spheres came together with the common goal of educating Black children can very well be transferred to the discussion about Planned Parenthood. The same goes for her suggestions for how to build empathy between people who are affected differently by the different oppressive structures of society. Instead of focusing on Planned Parenthood as a place where “the other” (“immoral women”, “non-taxpaying poor”) receive services, such discussions would be able to focus on the very broad range of services provided, as well as the very broad range of people using them: affordable cancer screenings for men and women, birth-control for poor families who can’t afford any more children, regular health-checkups for students and poor women and men, etc.

Being able to visualize such common-ground issues affecting a broad intersection of people could make it possible for more people to feel invested in the organization and look past the divisive Media narrative. It could enable them to cooperate with others in the fight against the ban. Building empathy between women who feel their reproductive choices attacked, and the poor who have their access to basic health-services limited, can also foster discussion about the real dimensions of whom Planned Parenthood is helping, and in what ways. And it can diminish the effect of the two-pronged attack on Planned Parenthood, on the one hand from the moralistic stance on women (targeted at conservative groups and men), and on the other from the fiscal stance against poor people (targeted at middle class and wealthy people). Only if we learn to empathize with the experiences of people in group to which we do not belong ourselves, understand that many people fall within both categories, and understand that while everyone is affected by issues of gender and class (as well as race) differently, with different aspect being visible and salient to them to different degrees (Hill Collins, 2011, p.763), no one is unaffected entirely, can we begin to look pas the single-focus divisive Media narratives and instead look on the actual range of effects of defunding Planned Parenthood. Effects that aren’t shown in the narratives provided by the Media, which prefers to ignore the poor altogether and prefers to show those who use Planned Parenthood’s services specifically and solely as women seeking abortion, usually portraying it as a moral failing.

References

Berger, J. (2011, Feb 5th). Abortion Debate Returns to Capitol Hill as Lawmakers Weigh New Restrictions. FoxNews.com. Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/02/05/abortion-debate-returns-capitol-hill-proposed-restrictions-advance/

Hill Collins, P. (2011) Towards a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection. In T. Ore (ed.), The Social Construction of Difference & Inequality(5th ed.) (pp. 760-774). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

King, Steve (2011). MediaMattersAction YouTube-Channel. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vex77n65nJ0

Mantsios, G. (2011) Media Magic: Making Class Invisible. In T. Ore (ed.), The Social Construction of Difference & Inequality(5th ed.) (pp. 93-101). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

Political Ticker (2011, Feb. 28th). Boehner in ‘war’ against Planned Parenthood. CNN Politics. Retrieved from http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/28/boehner-in-war-against-planned-parenthood/

Dispatches from an alternate dimension

1)Apparently, the way to ease traffic congestion is not to build more public transit and get people to walk and ride bikes, but to build more roads (just ask LA). Because “For most Americans – make that most of mankind — the car is an instrument of mobility, flexibility and speed” (just ask the Dutch and the Danes)

2)there are palm trees growing in Wisconsin

3)Wisconsinite palm trees also involved in teabagger having to go for x-rays and treatment of injuries from 3 seconds of shoving. Teabaggers must be very fragile individuals, no wonder they like Medicare (and on a tangentially related note: to this German, anti-fascist skinheads are a novelty)

4)Corporations paying nothing in taxes means they’re paying too much

5)Also, did you know that Planned Parenthood is invested in promiscuity? Because everyone knows non-promiscuous people don’t need pap smears, birth-control, diabetes screening, UTI tests and treatment, mammograms, or testicular and prostate cancer screening,

UPDATE: In a moment of serendipity, The Young Turks posted a segment on the same topic a moment ago: Fox Lies