At first taste, Thursday’s New York Times piece about a Portland, Ore., strip club that promotes veganism seems like just another example of nichification madness. Green-haired soccer mothers who samba while scrapbooking? Give them a support group! Why not a club for horny PETA-philes who sicken at the sight of a leather thong or a juicy steak?
But the story probes a vein of the radical vegetarian movement that’s — to thoroughly mutilate my metaphors — gotten on my nerves lately. PETA has always gone to extreme lengths to get its message out, whether it meant splashing the fur coats of celebrities with blood to illustrate the cruelty of the fur industry or photographing a seminaked model in a cage to raise awareness about pig farming practices. All is fair in love and activism. But lately, with “Skinny Bitch” books promoting veganism as the new fad diet and Vegan Vixens sexing up the airways with their soy-based song ‘n’ dance, the whole exploitation of women to protect animals has gotten a bit, well, obscene.
In the Times piece, the owner of the strip club, one Johnny Diablo, calls the women who have voiced objections to his club “feminazis,” then adds with no apparent irony: “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering.”
I guess this makes me a feminazi, though not a terribly outraged one — more perplexed and befuddled.
As the article notes, with only 2.3 percent of the U.S. population vegetarian, it’s remarkable that animal activists have achieved such a high profile. Maybe their prominence is the result of their T&A tactics.
I know, I know, sex sells, so whaddaya gonna do? In the article many of the defenders of using women’s bodies to promote animals rights explain that they are trying to convert he-men — y’know, those dudes who wouldn’t know grilled seitan if it slapped them in the ass. Although historically feminism and vegetarianism have often been aligned, now every movement’s on its own — each competing for eyeballs and dollars.
I think there’s a little more to the trend. These flesh-flogging animal lovers may abhor cruelty, but we’re not living in a particularly cruelty-free time. Whether it’s sarcastic blogging or negative campaigning, acting tough and a little mean has serious cultural friction. Employing hard-assed, sexy imagery makes organizations like PETA retain an aura of “cool” even though in reality they are talking about some very uncool subjects like pig farming and lost puppies. They’ve got to compensate for that! By the same token, I’ve heard a number of feminists snark about the pleasures of steak, the absurdity of animal rights. I’d guess that most women’s activists and animal activists would agree on a lot. But in a world where being naughty gets so much attention, it’s not cool to be cruelty-free about everything.
A story last week headlined “Royal College Warns Abortions Can Lead to Mental Illness” got Salon internal e-mail servers working overtime deep into a Sunday night. In the wake of “new” studies suggesting that abortions increase the risk of mental illness, Britain’s Royal College suggested that women not be allowed to have abortions without getting counseling on the risk to their mental health.
Just thinking about how such a law would play into the tactics of pro-life clinics in America gives me the heebie-jeebies. (“I’m OK, I don’t need counseling”/ “You’re not OK — let us help you deal with your inner demons — er, doubts.”)
On the other hand, having just come from a conversation with a friend who called her abortion the most “horrible, traumatic experience” of her life, I was curious about what new research might have changed these doctors’ minds.
The debate around the mental health effects of abortion is an old and inconclusive one. Back in the 1980s Reagan directed Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to find evidence that abortion causes mental problems, and he did his durndest, but in the end he said that none of the studies available were conclusive and that those that did find a link between mental illness and abortion didn’t control for preexisting conditions that cause women to want abortions in the first place — e.g., sexual abuse, poverty, domestic violence, etc. For a great summary of this debate, read this article from the Guttmacher Policy Review.
The first question, of course, is how does having an abortion compare with the alternatives: a) having an unwanted baby or b) giving that baby up for adoption? As Broadsheet’s Katharine Mieszkowski put it: “Is it glib to point out that carrying a pregnancy to term can also lead to mental illness? It’s called postpartum depression. There’s also the more serious postpartum psychosis. According to Dr. Sears, postpartum depression occurs in 10 to 15 percent of all deliveries. Among adolescent new mothers the number jumps to 30 percent. Another recent study found that poor women are more likely to suffer from postpartum depression.”
Post-adoption trauma is also relatively well documented. One study published in the British Journal of Social Work in 1996 found the “long-term implications of relinquishment are severe,” particularly in relation to mental health. A 1999 review of previous studies found that “the relinquishing mother is at risk for long-term physical, psychologic, and social repercussions” from “chronic unresolved grief.”
I would add to this another set of comparisons: How does having an abortion compare with some other reproductively oriented medical procedures (C-sections, hysterectomies and post-miscarriage D&C procedures) that depress the hell out of many women? Each of these procedures often carries emotional baggage: self-doubt, lingering regret, anxiety about going through another similar procedure again. My friend called the procedure traumatic because a) it hurt, b) the medical staff didn’t prepare her for the potential pain and didn’t offer any emotional support, and c) her boyfriend wasn’t with her. I couldn’t help flashing on my first C-section. It was bad enough to have a physically painful, traumatizing medical procedure that doctors didn’t prepare me for, but I got what I wanted: a healthy baby. Having a medical team stab around in my nether regions only to then walk away empty-handed might trigger even more heartache.
The “new” study, cited by the Royal College and published in 2006 by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found a link between abortion and later problems with depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviors and substance abuse disorders. But like so many previous studies, this one doesn’t control for preexisting mental health problems or sexual abuse. More important, the control group consisted of all young women who had babies, not those who had babies as a result of unintended pregnancies. Another more recent study found that young women who had abortions had better educational outcomes than their peers who chose to have babies of unintended pregnancies.
Maybe the hard truth is that getting knocked up with a baby you don’t want isn’t an easy problem to escape, no matter which path you choose. But until science finds that abortions are worse than the alternative, I’ll advocate for giving women the right to get out of the jungle any way they want.
Oh boy, oh boy. Mothers of daughters, don your boxing gloves cuz we got somethin’ to prove. If a new study of cow follicles is to be believed, then, as a mother of two daughters, I am probably unambitious, insecure and powerless and suffer from a weak sense of self. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so prickly — maybe I should embrace (big hugs!) my nurturing, empathetic and tolerant essence.
I know there’s all sorts of discomfiting science in this world, and we shouldn’t take it personally, especially if it’s true. But earlier this week an article about some ongoing research out of New Zealand downright infuriated me. Or perhaps I should say it raised my testosterone to levels even the Incredible Hulk might have found painful.
The article covered the new (and old) research of Valerie Grant, a reproductive scientist at the University of Auckland, who has been studying the connection between testosterone levels in women and their tendency to have boys or girls. The higher the testosterone level, her research finds, the higher the incidence of producing a male baby. Her more recent research focuses on cows: High levels of testosterone in bovine ovulatory follicles reliably predict the sex of the embryo.
If that had been the sum total of Grant’s conclusions, I would have been interested but not irritated. After all, there’s lots of research showing that testosterone in female mammals influences the incidence of male births, and last time I checked, we were still mammals. But the scientist’s willingness to make blanket generalizations about the personalities of certain kinds of women seemed to veer far beyond the beaten path to her laboratory.
In an earlier study, Grant took blood tests of women for testosterone while quizzing the women about how often they would describe themselves as proud, vigorous, rejected, self-satisfied, fearful, etc. The article sums up her findings: “She found that women who are confident, assertive, influential and with a strong sense of self have high levels of testosterone (you normally know one when you’ve met one) and produce sons, whereas mothers of daughters tend to be more nurturing, empathic and tolerant and have lower testosterone.”
Before it slips into the New Yorker’s vast archive of deep thoughts, don’t miss Jill Lepore’s fascinating essay, “Just the Facts Ma’am,” about facts and fiction in history, and how fact-flinging, great-man historians have bemoaned the postmodernist historian’s emphasis on the inherent subjectivity of all historical storytelling.
What struck me was the way Lepore recasts this historiographic discussion as a facet of literature’s gendered history. She traces the simultaneous rise of academic history as a mostly male pursuit in the 18th century alongside the novel, something she defines as a predominantly female narrative form. In contrast to traditional history, with its “cult of the fact,” the novel catered to a female readership with tales of female heroines often authored by women.
As a historian of American civilization at Harvard, Lepore presumably knows her way around a fact or two, so it’s not as if she’s spouting essentialist pabulum that women — those private, intimate, intuitive creatures — are more naturally drawn to fiction than men — those public, powerful, rationalist animals. But then what is she trying to say?
The article is in part a response to Gordon Wood’s “The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History,” which catalogs the shortcomings of “unhistorian historians” — Lepore among them — so no doubt the piece is a professional defense, airing some academic laundry. As someone who escaped the ivory tower long ago, I found the idea of an enduring gender divide in literary forms far more provocative.
Lepore writes: “By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history.”
After asserting that recent academic historians exploring the subject matter only novelists dared to address (private lives of ordinary people, women’s history, cultural history, etc.) have reclaimed from fiction writers “nearly everything except the license to invent … and women readers,” she drops this generalization: “Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.”
OK … I don’t have the qualifications to question her take on 18th century reading habits, but her claim that this gender split continues to this day begs for elaboration and little more — dare I say it? — evidence. Do men and women’s reading habits remain so similar to the those reading 300 years ago? If so, why? Are women still attracted to fiction because it holds a clearer mirror to life, insofar as fictional worlds are less dominated by men than are historical worlds? Or is there something else about the distinct narrative forms that speak to each gender’s experience?
We don’t get any answers from Lepore, but her essay raises intriguing questions. Although Lepore isn’t advocating the dismantling of evidence-based history, she does suggest that modern historians would do well to learn something from fiction writers: “History matters, but the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim. And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong …” I know I didn’t fall in love with history until college, when it wasn’t all about male rulers and the wars they started. Who knew that my apathy for the sometimes tautological parameters of history had such historical precedence?
Two weeks ago we wrote about a miniskirt march in South Africa protesting the widespread sexual assaults on women and the commonplace defense that the woman’s seductive dress invited the attack. As I mentioned then, opting for shorter hemlines seems like a kind of modern take-back-our-bodies approach to political protest. But a line in a BBC story about a group of women refugees from Liberia who are being expelled from Ghana made me wonder about the history of women using their bodies as protest signs.
According to the story, hundreds of women staged a monthlong protest next to a highway over government plans to ship them back to Liberia with $100. The women, who demanded $1,000 or resettlement in the West, were among the 27,000 refugees who ended up in Ghana after the Liberian war, which ended in 2003. Now that Liberia is enjoying relative stability (not to mention its formidable female president), Ghana is trying to clear them out.
The government arrested the protesters on the grounds that they stripped naked, which the women deny. The article then added the brow-furrowing line, with no further explanation: “Stripping naked is a traditional form of protest amongst poor and powerless women in parts of Africa.”
Who knew? A little Googling found that naked protesters have their own fan site — with photos of everything from a young actress protesting casting directors’ bizarre notions of “fat” to naked Mexican villagers protesting the government’s appropriation of their land, antiwar protesters with “breasts not bombs,” and a PETA protest against KFC involving a naked women in a cage. But no powerless African women. According to a watchdog Web site for South African jails, which covered a 2006 naked protest by 50 female prisoners, the traditional practice even has a name: setshwetla. A 2001 BBC story reporting on scientists abandoning their research projects in a Kenyan nature reserve after 300 naked women stormed their camp explained that female nudity is seen as an ill omen in Kenyan society and the women were attempting to curse the scientists. Back in 2002-2003 Nigerian women invoked the curse of nakedness when they staged naked protests against ChevronTexaco.
What’s interesting is that while in the West, naked protest involves an element of seduction, however sarcastic, these African protests seem to depend on the idea that women’s bodies are downright scary. Of course, it would be better if these women didn’t have to grow up in a world where the naked female form carries enough nasty mojo to bring bad luck, but you can’t blame them for using what they’ve got.
Oy. I tried not to do it — digest Obama’s speech about race in America with those feminist enzymes that break everything down along gender lines. While reading his speech I had to resist the echo of a parallel speech uttered by Hillary Clinton exploring how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, as Americans around the subject of gender. I resisted not simply because I don’t think it’s terribly fair to constantly compare the inequalities of gender with the inequalities of race but also for a more emotional reason. If Clinton got behind the lectern and talked candidly about gender, there would be a cringefest. She’s so politically correct, so whiny, so self-serving yadda yadda yadda: I fear it would be a quick but painful political suicide.
Today’s news about a new poll from CBS only served to confirm my suspicions. The poll attempted to get at people’s biases against voting for an African-American candidate versus their biases against voting for a female candidate by asking Americans not just whom they would vote for but also whom they thought the people they knew would vote for. Unsurprisingly, most people claimed they would happily vote for a woman or a black man. Their friends, however, are much less unencumbered by prejudices.
According to the poll, only 6 percent of white voters said they preferred to vote for a white candidate, all things being equal, but 34 percent of white voters reported that most people they know would not vote for a black person for president. Either people have learned racism isn’t good form (despite their prevailing racism) or we have a low-down opinion of our friends. But if this sounds depressing, the data on gender is even more discomfiting.
The poll found that 17 percent of voters admit they would prefer to vote for a man, all things being equal. (When this question is posed to Democrats only, the number drops to 6 percent.) As might be expected, their friends fared even worse — about half of the respondents told pollsters most people they knew wouldn’t vote for a woman for president. Truth in indirectness? Or simply a knee-jerk assumption that other people are not as enlightened? It’s difficult to know, but it does suggest that gender still looms larger as both a real and imagined source of bigotry. (A majority of those polled admitted that racists jokes offended them more than sexist jokes.)
What this poll also makes me wonder is how many Democrats are voting not for the candidate of their choice but for the candidate’s winning potential? In this way, gender (or race) might be a deciding factor in the election — not because individuals don’t want to vote for a woman or for a black man, but because they fear that, in the general election, all those “people they know” will end up slipping into the voting booth and casting a ballot for the status quo.
