Scuse me while I laugh for 20 minutes straight.

So I was reading this article today on Shakesville and went to the website to check it out.  I got bored pretty quickly, despite the repeated use of phrases like "the black gaping gap" and...no, wait, I just lost interest again.  This is 'Esquire;' I can't remember whether or not it involves actual porn or just porny shots, so I click on 'Women,' and then "13 Sex Secrets Men Don't Know About Women."

Ha.  Oh, ha ha.  I'll just deconstruct, shall I?

1.) Women don't like explosions, in art or in life.

Excuse me?  I love a good explosion!  Killer Klowns From Outer Space wouldn't have been the same without that ice cream truck blowing up in a fiery fireball.  Of course, the best kind of explosion is the sort you walk away from slowly without a backward glance.  Anyway, the take-home lesson here is EXPLOSIONS ARE GREAT.

Women aren't as funny as men. We're often cleverer, frequently wittier, but to be really funny demands a certain clownishness that our grace just does not allow. It's fine, really it is.

Excuse me?  What?  What planet did you grow up on?  What?  What?  Teh sexisms!  They're great for everyone.  Ladies are graceful and unfunny!  Men are oafish louts!  But it's ok!

We grow pathetic goatees and look awful in cargo shorts anyway.

Is this in the wrong article?  I've tried to grow a pathetic goatee at least twelve times and have come up hairless twelve for twelve.  Naturally, this saddens me.  Also, can't I wear cargo shorts without goatees?  Mostly WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.

Women are aware of about 10 percent of the things men actually think and say about us. Best to keep it under five.

According to whom?  The author?  Who is a woman, who is magically telepathic with all men and therefore knows everything women miss?  'Best to keep it under five?'  Is that encouraging guys to not communicate?

Women love to be taken out to eat. It makes our day.

Oh, except for all those ones who get pissed off unless we're splitting the bill, or those ladeez who don't like to or can't eat in public, or those ladeez who don't like to be 'taken' anywhere but will go where we damn well please.

A clean apartment will get you more tail than you'd think.

That's right!  The only thing women appreciate about men is...neatness?  Whut?

Given the chance, women will smell and re-smell the scented-candle display at the store. We really can do this for ages.

Except the ones who hate scented candles, or the ones who get migraines from smelling scented candles, or the ones who can't smell at all, or the ones who smell one candle and say 'Now, really, that's quite enough!' or the ones who are unfortunate enough to smell That Red One first and subsequently can't smell anything less odorous than a skunk for an hour, or the ones who avoid the malodorous candle display at all costs at all times....

Our clothes are complicated, our shoes unforgiving, and our constitutions delicate, so please, valet park.

I'm fragile, Mister, just like any girl would be / And so misunderstood!  So treat me de-li-cate-ly!
Oh, my delicate constitution!  Excuse me while I swoon over here!  It's probably the shoes!  And maybe this corset!  The important thing is that if you don't pay somebody to park your car for you I'll probably just DIE.  Of pain.


Every living woman likes wedding crap. Even lesbians.

'Even lesbians?'  Because, what, lesbians are only borderline women?  Because 'even lesbians' sometimes marry?  Also, bad news you guys, I think I'm a vampire or something -- I'm apparently some kind of undead.

"Girls night out" is usually some other woman's idea.

Yeah, I swear, I hate spending nights with all my bffs!  It's just the worst.  Really.

Oftentimes, women simply want to lie back and get laid.

'Lie back and get laid?'  Ur doin it rong!

One orgasm is usually enough.

Again, a massive ur doin it rong to this one.  One?  Really?  ONE?  Please, for the love of Lady Gaga, check out Toys in Babeland asap.

Women would rather be with you. We like you. Honestly, we talk about you all the time.

Rather be with you, as opposed to...volunteering in China?  Having a bubble bath?  Playing with cats?  Oh, I can think of examples.  Don't make me pull out my examples!

 Most importantly, I think the question we're all asking ourselves is What the fuck does this have to do with sex?  Advertised: 13 Sex Secrets?  How is 'Women aren't funny like men are lololol!' in any way connected to sex?  Or cargo shorts?  Or valet parking?  WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.  Also, heterosexism for teh win!  I protest!  Loudly!  Now tell me what I missed.

SMEYER HAS SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

I know, RobPatt!  My hair feels similarly about this turn of events!

Anyway, Smeyer would just like to let you know that if you don't have babies immortality will just suck.  Seriously, apparently all the female vamps have to do with their endless lives is totally freak the fuck out about pregnancies, because their eternal, stony uteri will never ever give them the one thing they need for satisfaction:

 

That's right.  Babies.  Screaming, wailing babies everywhere.

Because while vampladies' gametes are frozen into tiny icy pebbles of death and decay which, interestingly, could be sold to chill people's martinis,

 

vampmenz sperm are still very much alive and happily impregnating people.  Anyhoo, ladies, so be sure to jump on it and get freaky with your husboyfriend before he turns you all immortal and such, because otherwise you'll lament it for the rest of your very, very long lives.  And it's totally worth it.  I mean, there's that teensy hitch wherein your unholy child chews its way out of your body --

but I'm pretty sure it looks like that guy up there, so no fear -- and then there's the part where yr husboyfriend gives you a C-section with his teeth and then stabs a giant needle full of his drool into yr heart, but given that the interior of your heart looks like this,

 

I wouldn't worry about it too much.  And then there's that bit where your burbling bouncing babylass breaks yr spine and maybe most of yr organs on her way out, but hey!  Nothing immortality can't fix!  In short: babies solve everything, so be a vampire AND a mother.  They go together like rats n' plague!

Blog for Choice II: boy have I got some opinions

Sometimes, when I’m in the mood for choir-preaching or having mental arguments with imaginary opponents, I like to think about some serious logical gaps in how we, as a culture, think about abortion. More rarely, I like to blog about it.

I’ve been “pro-choice,” as they say, since I found out that abortion existed. First, it was a vague idea that came with the knowledge that my parents voted for Bill Clinton, and therefore I was a Democrat, too, and Democrats, I understood, were pro-choice. By high school, I’d begun to form my own political views, and I thought the standard “it’s a woman’s choice” rhetoric made sense. I mean, who else’s choice was it gonna be? Later, the “A fetus is not a person” justification seemed most salient. At some point, when the idea of actual sperm making contact with my own personal ova became more than abstract, my pro-choice feelings intensified rather alarmingly. But at the bottom of it all was that same bumper-sticker conviction: It’s a woman’s choice.

Along the way, I developed my own logical reasons why abortion was not immoral and absolutely had to remain legal. Much of this happened in conversation with a non-imaginary opponent a few years ago, one of my closest friends, who I’ll call June. June is a very intelligent, well-spoken, argumentative woman, and at the time, she was the only woman I knew who was anti-abortion and willing to talk—and, even more amazingly, listen—to me about it.

(More common—outside my feminist circles—are the people like roommate M, who once commented, over two MSNBC talking heads blathering about Stupak, “I’m so tired of people talking about abortion. I mean, can’t we just agree to disagree and move on?” He apologized, five minutes later, after I’d finished shouting [my contention, in brief: “NO!”]. In retrospect, that’s probably the sort of behavior that leads to people being tired of people talking about abortion.)

June is a logical person, so I appealed to logic. First, theology: June (who was not actively religious and, though spiritually curious, definitely not Christian) said she was convinced that life, including ensoulment, began at conception. Fresh from a genetics class, I argued that thirty percent of pregnancies ended in miscarriage. So, what, God (or the Force, or whatever) snuffed out thirty percent of souls before they’d even had a chance to peek outside the uterus? That wasn’t any kind of God whose world I was willing to live in. Therefore, abortion is okay.

Second: fetal personhood. I argued that there had to be a bright line. Any developmental markers like “heartbeat” or “fingerprints” were inadmissibly subjective. Viability was a moving target and varied with individuals and historical periods. A hundred years ago, babies born three months premature would die; today, they sometimes live: so was a six-months-along fetus not a person in 1900? It was either conception or birth (this was my most dubiously-supported contention, I think), and either God was really mean or conception was out. Therefore, life begins at birth. Therefore, abortion is okay.

Third: legal. I was reading Susan Bordo’s excellent (excellent! I cannot emphasize this enough: excellent) Unbearable Weight and was halfway through the chapter on legal precedent and bodily integrity, so I felt qualified to preach. In this country, we cannot legally force a man to give blood or a kidney or marrow to save his dying brother’s inarguably real life—or his dying child’s: it’s a violation of his bodily integrity. So how could we legally force a woman to do anything with her body, such as, you know, carry a pregnancy to term with it, to preserve something that may or may not be life? Therefore, abortion is okay.

We talked for a long time. June agreed that I’d gone a long way toward convincing her, and that she would think about what I’d said. We haven’t talked about abortion in a while, but maybe logic changed her mind. That’s how it should work, right? Argument A, Argument B, Argument C: therefore, abortion is okay. Did I mention that June and I met in high school debate?

But lately, I’ve been thinking about logic in even plainer terms. Like, seriously: if abortion were illegal in this country, what would that look like?

Most people I’ve ever talked to about abortion are ambivalently pro-choice. Like: “I wouldn’t ever have one, and I think it’s very sad, but, um, I do think it should be legal?” At the very least, even most anti-choice people will make an exception for medical emergencies, rape, and incest.

So imagine this: it’s a five-minutes-into-the-future dystopia, and abortion is illegal except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape and incest. We know very well that whether abortion is legal or illegal has very little bearing on the number of abortions taking place. So aside from women traveling to Mexico and Canada and Mandy’s (hey, she goes to med school!), we would surely have women obtaining abortions in the usual medical settings. It’s allowed for cases of rape and incest, right? Like the sympathetic back-alley doctors in days of yore, like modern heroes like the late Dr. George Tiller, we’d surely have dedicated physicians willing to operate on or prescribe RU-486 for women who needed it (and had the resources to pay out of pocket):

Doctor: “Rape or incest, right?”

Patient: “Right.”

Of course, in our sucky dystopia, this would be an abuse of the system, and lawmakers would surely try to eliminate it. Proof would be required to obtain a safe, legal abortion in the twenty-first-century United States.

Oh yeah, proof of rape, days or weeks or months after the fact. Not like, you know, that’s gonna be difficult. Or causes any trouble for anyone now.

And this is just the inconsistency on my mind this week. It also reminded me of an old Anna Quindlen column on what, in Anti-Choice Dystopia, would actually be done with women who had abortions anyway. Hint: anti-abortion protesters have not, apparently, ever thought about this.

Then there’s the “men’s rights” argument that men should have an equal say in what happens to the fetus they helped make. In a non-patriarchal world where everyone is equal and no one coerces anyone else and everyone has access to safe, legal, and affordable birth control and, oh yeah, men bear an equal share of the pregnancy burden (maybe they get joint custody and carry the fetus every other day?), then sure, men can have an equal say. Until that day, when the non-pregnant partner disagrees with the pregnant partner, the tie’s gotta go to somebody.

Because at the bottom of this whole issue, when an unwanted pregnancy happens, someone has to decide what to do about it. Should it be the U.S. Senate? The Supreme Court? The church? The state? The patriarchy? The Man? The man?

Or... the woman?

Trust women. It’s just plain logic.