So, I’ve been hanging out at LifeNews on facebook for some crazy unknown reason, beginning with a pretty involved conversation about Hobby Lobby. Here is part of the conversation within a thread in response to this article:
Whether or not birth control should be part of comprehensive health care is a real conversion.
The best arguments for it is that
1) It is used for medical conditions, including endometriosis, which about 1 in 10 women have.
2) Reducing the costs of birth control decreases the number of abortions.
“Sandra Fluke is a slut” – is not a conversation. It’s just an insult.
Ms. Fluke was also keen to mention the use of birth control by married women – just to stave off the inevitable dehumanizing “close your legs” comments that any woman who has ever talked about birth control or sex has had to deal with since the beginning of time.
A majority of this thread simply provides evidence that many people who are active in the pro-life lobby are more angered by the idea of people having non-reproductive sex than, you know, abortions.
[Apparently this is true even with some within the pro-life movement that identify as feminists.]
If I’m wrong, I’m wrong – if so, explain to me why a woman, that for all we know is a virgin, is being called a slut because she thinks that birth control (like quite a few other drugs and treatments that involve reproduction, like male circumcision and erectile dysfunction medication, and, you know, all the medical expense of having babies) should be covered by health insurance.
Even if you are against birth control in general, which I know some people are unless the birth control method (like the rhythm method for example) can be redefined as not actually “birth control”, that presents a strong difference of opinion about that subject – what does Sandra Fluke’s personal life have to do with that? – even if she was promiscuous?
If she were married and gave the same testimony and had the same opinion, would the people in this thread then magically respect her as a human being? Or, would fans of this page still allow several people to say vile things about her worth as a human being, without any challenge what-so-ever?
For example:
“this stupid fool makes me want to puke … do hope that God melts her vagina so nothing else can come of her….”
and
“she and other skanks like her, encouraged women to vote with their brain between their legs!”
and
“A pro murderer of innocent children gets the cover? Imagine what she’d do to my disabled child? Does she even need birth control, what man in their right mind wants that hole????”
***
Another person had this to say, which was not as visceral, but seemed ironic considering the tone of the thread. I did pick some of the more awful comments to highlight, but the level and amount of insults on the thread as a whole was pretty darn disturbing.
“She helped reduce women to one issue, our vaginas. I can tell you there are a 100 things more important than my vagina and how much sex I have and if the tax payer pays for my promiscuity”
Cause nothing validates women as more than their lady parts than calling them skanks that no man would want to fuck when they have a different opinion than you do about something.
***
Update: LifeNews put up another article – this one more to the point about Sandra Fluke being nominated for Person of the Year. In this thread, among a tirade of insults, most of which accuse her of being promiscuous including insults such as “slut”, “whore” and “POS” (piece of shit) and a few insulting her appearance, two brave souls did call for civility.
Christopher said, “Don’t be nasty, folks. We all need prayers.”
Mary said, “Whoa whoa whoa: I won’t be part of calling someone a “slut.”"
So, hats off to you Christopher and Mary! I apologize if I implied that EVERYONE on that site was equally, painfully sexist.
Also, apparently The Daily Kos recently put up a scathing blog post about the Pro-Life Movement that has begun a bit of a dialog on the LifeNews site concerning slut-shaming. Several members there have never heard of the term, unaware that calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and degrading her for a lack of fuckability while simultaneously insisting that she be a virgin in order to have any worth as a human being is often used to illustrate what the phrase means.
Just to be clear on the definition of “slut”:
Well said. Thank you.
Thanks. By the way, I am going to have to go watch Snow White and the Huntsman now.
Me too!
As a woman that will be on birth control for the rest of my reproductive life to avoid cysts, I wish I had been at her side. I am sure repeats of the 2 emergency room visits and several ultrasounds would be much more logical. Seriously?
Yeah, I have cysts as well. However, I’m very lucky – two pregnancies have seemed to magically fix the issue. (Cross fingers)
While I was trying to get pregnant though, so that I wasn’t on birth control, the pain I had almost every month was beyond reason. (There was one episode so awful that, to this day, I suspect I actually had a spontaneous abortion. This happened shortly before I became pregnant as well.) Taking Aleve beforehand did help quite a bit, once it was suggested to me. I was strongly under-diagnosed. I suspect that if I had been on hormonal birth control while I was a teenager, I would have been in much less pain and it wouldn’t have taken nearly six years to conceive.
The idea that hormonal birth control is somehow magically NOT “health care” is really messed up.
When I mentioned the use of hormonal birth control to treat endometrosis to the anti-BC crowd on the LifeNews thread, one person responded with the assumption that the girls and women who use it for that purpose were a tiny minority (as if that would invalidate the information – and yeah, of course she just made that up and had no idea what the numbers were), so I found the statistics on that.
Considering that I was undiagnosed for over 20 years, having cysts, and never being diagnosed for endometriosis (though it’s very likely) – I suspect that those statistics might even be low at one in ten.