I normally don’t post politics here.* There’s always a first time for everything. And the everything right now is the fact that half of my field would rather commit suicide than actually think. Particularly when thinking involves not repeating slogans that are pushed at them from above with the implication that “all the coolest kids think this way.”
Again, blame it on us being misfits, and misfits’ own misfits besides. We’d do anything to fit in. Well, most of us. I still prefer to stand by the side of the road holding both middle fingers up.
On my Facebook page I echoed a friend’s post of a Heinlein poster with a quote about how forcing a man to pay for a service he doesn’t want “for his own good” is the greatest tyranny. This did not apply to any current controversy. It applied ONLY to the general fact that – is this news to anyone? – I don’t like taxation. I don’t think pacifists should have to pay for war, and I don’t think I should have to pay for stupid crony capitalism.
In minus three seconds, someone brought up that a worse tyranny than this was the “War on Women.”
Let me point out right now that if I hear that phrase once more I’m going to lose it. No, forget that. I’m going lose it right NOW.
Let me tell you what war is, okay?
War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.
War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.
War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.
In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.
If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.
And please don’t come back and say women have to carry babies and this is unfair. Or that men are stronger and this is unfair. Or that… This is NOT kindergarten. LIFE is unfair. NATURE is unfair. Civilization and society can only go so far to compensate for the basic inequality of nature. It is not the job of nature or government to turn us all into neuters with the exact same aptitudes and abilities. And I, for one, am glad. If you’re not, consider your relationship with your own gender. I suggest your war is mostly internal.
If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world. You are also unleashing a monster. Get the government to force this and NOTHING is out of bonds. Forget selling you the rope to hang you with. The government will eventually force you to pay them to hang you.
I’d like to believe the comment is wrong which I read on some blog defining feminists as a potemkin village of bicycled fish. But judging by how American women seem to be so completely embarrassed by their vaginas that they demand all sorts of compensation and affirmation of their specialness, I’m very afraid the comment was right. These women have things like Vagina Monologues (Imagine, Penis Monologues could ONLY be a middle school play, but because it’s the FEMALE body part we’re supposed to be in awe of it. WHY?) and go on about how they’re powerful, but melt in a pile of hysteria because someone was less than respectful to them.
Meanwhile, real women need someone else to pay for their contraception or give them a hand up in school or business like a fish needs a bicycle and would NOT stoop to having special treatment lavished on them. They meet men as equals and refuse to be afraid of them, or ashamed of who they are.
I know! Let’s make war on men, and refuse to listen to them when they’re abused, ignore their claims to their children, take away their right to choose if they want to be fathers (and pay for it) or not, design the school system so it doesn’t fit either their learning style or their development and oh, yes, drug them so they don’t act like boys AND all the while scream that they’re the ones hurting us.
Which would be distinguishable from the present state of affairs, because….
Is that crickets I hear? Oh, yes it is.
On behalf of all the women with male children; on behalf of all the women with male spouses, on behalf of all the women who are NOT ashamed of being women, and who DO actually like men – it’s time to stop beating on males and screaming we’re being hurt.
Make love, not war.
Update: I truly am very busy with updates, and other than dipping in very occasionally and posting an answer to a comment that struck me, I don’t have time to answer the same questions over and over, like, you know, “women pay for insurance, therefore they pay for their contraceptives” — well, no. Employers at least match costs, and sometimes more. Or “aren’t women entitled to contraceptives the same way they’re entitled to other medicines” well, no. It’s not therapeutic. If you have a medical condition that REQUIRES contraceptives, then even churches furnish them. Otherwise, like infertility treatment which bankrupted my young self it’s your choice and therefore not necessarily covered. (Most employers do cover contraception because it’s cheap.) “You’re a gender traitor” oh, please. Who sold you a bill of goods kid? Your genitalia, your skin color, your orientation, none of those are predictive of how you think. If you think they are, you’re just a sheep. Remember what happens to sheep in the end. Yes, I was born female. I’ve never let it limit my life or my thoughts and I see no reason why it should. Other females are my sisters? Under whose genetics? And if so, males are my brothers. Why should I love one more than the other. We should discuss women in other countries? WHY? You are all going unhinged here. And watching the fine fruit of feminism in the anglosphere, why would any other country follow suit? But if you want to fight for female rights worldwide, I salute you. It is at least a worthy endeavor. However, remember their culture is not ours and don’t extrapolate backwards. MOST American men want equals — that’s the result of frontier life and WWII and a lot of other things. They don’t like women covered in sofa-slip-covers. So don’t say “It could happen here, if we don’t continue beating on males.” It d*mn well couldn’t. A lot of American women have guns. And the others should think about it. Then think about why you equate having to pay the full cost of contraceptives with being pregnant and barefoot in kitchen. Condoms are very cheap, pills that are not for other conditions, ditto, and diaphragms a little more. It’s not worth violating your fellow citizens conscience over. The same state that mandates they give you contraceptives now, could make them go away tomorrow, if they thought they needed more kids. Towards the end of the Sov Union contraception and abortions were well nigh impossible to get. I’ve heard stories of condoms washed and reused. The state that gives can also take away. Trust not the state.
Most of the comments about women having the right to this and the right to that and not having any RESPONSIBILITY for themselves or the culture they’re distorting, which, yes, all echo each other, made me wake up today thinking about this clip.
I think most of these people are not so much at war with men, as they’re at war with reality. Apparently the seventies feminist fallacy about gender being infinitely moldable never stopped resonating with some people. But, it’s not, and girls will be girls and boys will be boys, otherwise all you end up with is truncated versions of both and a wrecked future. And this mother of boys and science fiction writer would prefer you think about what you’re doing and whether you really want this.
According To Hoyt 
Ms Hoyt forgot a few other fronts in the war on Men. More males under the age of 18 commit suicide than young women but there are more programs at suicide prevention among women and girls. More males never finish high school than females, but at the national level the academic assistance programs are aimed almost exclusively at females. More males under 18 report being struck or assaulted by their date than do females under 18 (CDC survey) but antiviolence programs are aimed exclusively at preventing violence by males – and perpetuating the myth that domestic violence is exclusively a male problem.
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I couldn’t LIST all the things we’re doing to males. It’s pure evil. I’m the mother of two sons, and I watched what goes on in schools up close and personal. It’s sickening. We’re eating our seed corn. I agree with you.
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Wonderful, and never give in Sarah, please. I also never give in and I’ve endure attacks, but I’m steadfast. What’s right is right.
– As an aside, Charles K” – you fooled no one, Miss.
Back to confronting every time, when something if very wrong. When I’m offended at work by jokes the 4 to 1 female to male staff love to tell of men being sexually harmed, I confront courteously and with a prayer for humanity. I haven’t seen, since about 1993, the oft bragged about female strengths (when compared to men), of empathy, intuition, understanding, sustainers of life, etc.
I often visit bookstores after work, the business section. I’ve noticed much movement, shelves filling with success/business books geared specifically to women (guaranteed sale via exclusivity and the “gender war”), e.g. “The Art of War for Women” where it states in direct terms, women are, stronger, more patient, have more endurance, are more intelligence, have greater willpower and compassion, forget “Win-Win,” women are superior by their inherent (!) strengths” and so. (I laugh at the “inherent strengths” part because empathy is absent in those who don’t practice it, along with any intuition through feeling they could have had. Also, when society programs out/desensitizes male suffering, female empathy for males simply cannot develop naturally.
One such business book’s author, Chin-Ning Chu, inserted a single sentence in the introduction to state not “antimen”(!) and “I love men” – while the rest of her book she writes in superiority terms rather than, “woman are can also be very strong physically as demonstrated in these examples…” It was a useless statement where she drew more battle lines – for her beliefs, for money, both, parts of each? As I read the constant rubbish that women are naturally X (something good) and men are naturally X (something despicable that we want to borrow and beat them with, or trick them with, or just do it the better woman’s way) was tiresome, until I pulled back to take the strategies to see a broader picture for men. There’s always a need for a good pep talk. Some women may need hyperbole and a low grade hatred to function. Yet, largely such a style of “empowerment” (I beginning to hate that word) are harmful, are they not? The nemeses are…all of the men that exist at work! They don’t belong. If women are vastly superior in office settings compared to men. as stated in nearly all the new business books, then come hiring time, who would not be reluctant to follow their programming and higher fewer of the “inferior males”?
One cannot lift society by tilting 50% of it down. The see-saw can also go too fast and one side will crash (I have actual experience.)
These numerous new books, by majority female authors, directed at the majority numbers of college graduates who are females, waging battle against the “terrible, insensitive, and inferior men” at work trying also to feed their families… These authors go past “empowerment” and into serious discussions of superiority. And this is true regardless of one sentence disclaimers to the contrary. Such disclaimers are incredibly rare, but ultimately I believe, disingenuous. Proof is the further reading of the author’s book(s).
Feelings of superiority are an extremely dangerous area when it comes to victims. Victims who are considered inferior are not afforded the same protections, and are violated more often. Two of a millions cases, “The Raping of Nanking” and the Bosnian-Serb War – atrocities occurred due to feelings of superiority and that the other side “deserved” it. Is that the most common thing you hear for men who private parts are injured for any reason and the victims are mental mush for life (“He deserved it! Hahahahahaha!”).
We’re on a slow atrocity path against males. When Don Imus was fired over racial remarks (deserved) and The View’s entire cast was not fired for yukking it up over a poor man’s penis being severed, along with comments stated such as, “the dog won’t want that nasty thing” – then men cannot respect an audience, a message, or a society of women that are willing to view them this way, with utter, abhorrent lack of compassion. Men can ONLY hate. Men who don’t want to hate anything much less a whole gender because who is good? Who would laugh with the audience if they were in the audience? Whose morals are so destroyed that a missing body part, if it’s a man’s sexual parts, equals mental trauma of any magnitude. (I say a leg or knee for rape – several important reasons for society).
Women magnificently up in arms against is the only, only possible response that keeps men engaged in caring about women’s issues, because no issue matters as much to a man as believing women are worth building/transforming himself for (life’s sacrifices), and also nothing matter as much to him as the parts that make him male. There is no compromise. We see men (Jay Leno, etc.) that laugh have lost enormously trying to win women’s favor, and confused women. They’ve bought into, “Don’t so serious! As a woman I want to be taken seriously and not when I make intentionally painful jokes that keep men on edge and make me feel powerful where I can be cute and say ‘don’t worry; you worry too much’ to show you I care…”
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To reiterate my earlier comment, posted at Sarah’s request, it doesn’t matter if you are supporting Sarah’s post or not, if you try to post a comment that doesn’t further the discussion, it won’t be approved. If you try to post a comment that simply reiterates what has already been said time and time again, it won’t be approved. If you lapse into a profanity filled rant, it won’t be approved. If you are being a general a**, you won’t be approved. If all you are doing is drive-by trolling without adding to the discussion, you won’t be approved. Name-calling isn’t going to be allowed. Nor will comments citing as “proof” of a stance links that are to sites with their own agendas. Misquoting proposed legislation won’t be allowed. Oh yeah, if you have already violated these rules and your comment has been spammed, nothing else will be approved until Sarah has time to look at the backlog and that won’t be happening today because she has edits to finish.
In other words, if your comment is waiting for moderation or is already marked as spam, posting another comment accusing Sarah of not wanting to hear “the truth” or being afraid of “the truth” isn’t going to help your cause. Frankly, if she followed my advice, she’d turn off comments simply because the drive-bys have done their best to disrupt the discussion of the issue by those who are actually willing to discuss and not lapse into rhetoric and party-line dogma.
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Here’s a very pointed question about this debate, if it is somehow beyond the nature of fairness for we the taxpayers to pay for a woman’s birth control – then why is right for us to pay for a man’s viagra?
If we cannot bring ourselves to pay for a woman to regulate her cycle, treat chronic acne and delay having a child until she is fiscally able to care for one without becoming a burden on the welfare system we should not be financing the ability of those with ED to be able to have sex.
Part of the argument made by Rush Limbaugh is that this forces us to pay for a woman’s sex life, yet we’ve been paying for the silver haired male to have a sex life for almost 20 years now. Legislating the way insurance handles contraception is a health issue for many and a choice issue for an even greater many. Viagra (already paid for by nearly all insurance carriers in America) is 100% choice driven.
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Here’s a very pointed answer: You’re conflating apples with oranges and calling them both kittens. And then you’re wailing because we won’t agree they should be petted.
Let’s clarify things, shall we — THE PILL FOR MEDICAL ISSUES OTHER THAN CONTRACEPTION IS ALREADY UNIVERSALLY COVERED ELSEWHERE.
SO IS VIAGRA FOR REASONS OTHER THAN SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION. (Though fixing it is a side effect as contraception is a side effect of using the pill for say hormone replacement.)
Okay — did you follow along? SO FAR WE’RE EQUAL. Good, right?
Viagra for sexual dysfunction is covered by some insurers. The Pill for contraception is covered by some insurers.
So far we’re equal, right? Right? Right.
Now the government wants to make it mandatory that RELIGIOUS EMPLOYERS WHOSE RELIGION FORBIDS CONTRACEPTION OR FACILITATING OTHERS’ USE OF CONTRACEPTION AND/OR ABORTION to provide this free for all employees. (We won’t go into the “fix” which is kindergarten level accounting tricks and THINKS that money is some sort of grand illusion that comes from nowhere.)
Religious employees say no way. And this is a war on women? No, madame, this is a war on sanity.
So do religious employees cover viagra for non-medical purposes? I don’t care. (They probably don’t.) The important thing is that the government isn’t trying to force a church — say the Never Ending Vaginitude of the Holy Goddess — into providing Viagra for males against Holy Vaginitude’s beliefs. IF they were I’d stand with the sisters of holy vaginitude in telling the government to back off.
The principle at stake is the right to worship and believe in the manner you think will earn you heaven or set you right with the Almighty. It’s enshrined in this thing called the Constitution.
It might surprise you that the principle you’re applying “Why do they do this for men and not women?” is not enshrined in said constitution. It is in fact enshrined in Mrs. McGillicuddy’s rules for kindergarten classes. Adults understand that equality under the law sometimes leads to less than fairness. Trying to create fairness in results ONLY creates tyranny and death EVERY time. Let it go. Pony up the $10 a month for your contraceptives, or get another job. It’s a free country, regardless of your efforts otherwise.
Life is unfair. Adults know that and live with it. Only infants want someone to take someone else’s cookies away because THEY can’t have sugar.
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There is a line in The Right Stuff, which I am sure I am going to mangle, ‘We are arguing pussy when what we need to be arguing is monkey.’ This blog is not about denying anyone birth control, although it was inspired by the reactions to recent political events surrounding that debate. I suggest you try reading all of the blog, it really is rather interesting.
Oh, and I for one don’t think that it is proper to force the taxpayer to pay for viagra, either.
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A. This blog is about something more fundamental than the tempest in a teapot over contraceptives;
B. The point isn’t that *taxpayers* pay for anything: The point is that the might of the Federal Government is being brought to bear on religious institutions (First Amendment!) to engage pay for something that, if not *medically* necessary, goes against a stated belief and is well-known to anyone who accepts employment from them. Note: It’s not just the Roman Catholics. I know of at least three separate and distinct Lutheran synods who are also fighting this. There are undoubtedly more denominations, also.
C. See A. Nobody is stealing anybody’s lady parts. This is a smoke screen raised by the present administration to attempt to take focus away from horrendous unemployment, skyrocketing prices for everything from gasoline to food, and a budgetary defecit that will take at least a generation to pay off if the spending stopped within the hour.
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Unfortunately this is actually tangental to both main themes for this – the one that inspired it, and the “war against men”.
Even by your admission, not every carrier has viagra on the policies, and even of those that do, I’m sure not all policies, especially the “generic only” ones, cover viagra.
In short, there is a CHOICE. You CAN get viagra covered if you choose to pay for it. But you don’t HAVE to.
If your employer is providing the health insurance, THEY can provide viagra on the coverage, or not. It’s their CHOICE.
So, since even the catholic church will cover birth control meds for hormone regulation (actual health reasons), and it’s possible to get birth control pills AND condoms pretty cheap (or simply not have sex), AND no-one is forcing you, or anyone else to cover someone’s viagra prescription unless you choose to select a health plan or enroll in an employer health plan that covers it, and if you’re employed by the catholic church you get to spend the money you get on both necessities (rent, food) and luxuries (fancy purses or phones) or even contraceptives as YOU SO CHOOSE…
… what precisely is the problem?
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sorry – meant to write “War against women as an excuse for the power grab being BS”
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Eh. I understood your meaning. I’d also already answered trying to make light. Of course, given the focus on “why do boys have cookies if we don’t” I expect this person won’t be able to think her way out of a wet paper bag with two hands and a seeing eye dog. So I expect more repetitions of “pointed questions.” (Why not blunt ones?) My guess is someone told her “Boys have viagra, but they don’t want us to have the pill, it’s unfair. Go yell.” And she did. Sigh. We have A LOT of work to do in this world, if there IS to be a world for our grandkids.
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Bravo Ms Hoyt!
I am 58 years old. I was in the first class of women to attend a previously all male college. I drove a forklift by day while working my way through a night MBA program when men still greatly outnumbers women in such programs. When the men around me got out of line I corrected them without making a federal case of it. After that I earned a law degree, also while working full time.
About 15 years later I listened as the career columnist for a major newspaper told a group of women professionals she had told her own son, a recent college graduate, the job discrimination he was facing was just payback for what white men had done to women and minorities. She wasn’t heavily applauded but she should have been booed off the stage!
It seems during that period American women went from strong independent creatures to fragile victims of some white male hegemony. Horse hockey! The only time I have every been a victim it has been to my own wishful thinking and stupidity. . You want to talk about women victims, I’ll introduce you to clients who spent years working in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
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Wow, I missed all the fun this weekend. I’m not going to plow through all the posts, but I wanted to add my support to you.
I’ve been the only girl in the clubhouse since I was two. Never had any trouble. My best, closest friends have been women, but that’s because of the nature of women’s friendships. But as long as I was as competent as the guys, I was welcome. Yes, I’ve had friends who’ve met some resistence, but even they say that 99 % of their experiences breaking into the male domain – and back then, it was breaking in, not the ease of today – was positive, that the guys were supportive.
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From the addendum:
Apparently the seventies feminist fallacy about gender being infinitely moldable never stopped resonating with some people. But, it’s not, and girls will be girls and boys will be boys, otherwise all you end up with is truncated versions of both and a wrecked future.
A friend once told me (so this is, admittedly, anecdotal) of a forward thinking mother who was raising her children gender neutral and weapon free. The boy used to fold his Barbie into a ninety degree angle and while holding on to the torso, pointed the feet and said, “Bang, bang.”
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My sister gave dolls AND trucks to her sons AND her daughters. The two girls put the dolls in the back of their trucks and went on a picnic. The boys lay their dolls in front of the trucks, ripped their heads off, and ran over the dolls with the trucks while alternating between “large truck” noises” and “pitiful, agonizing dolls-being-run-over” noises. They were later disappointed when the girls refused to let the boys’ dolls come to their Barbie party, though (it turned out that the party’s dress code required heads).
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ROFL. We didn’t buy toy buns for our firstborn. We didn’t have a TV. We didn’t watch movies. He didn’t have any little friends. (BTW, all this wasn’t on purpose, it just worked out this way.) My MIL sent him a wooden puzzle for xmas with the States. Robert ran around shooting everyone with the state of Florida and dropping down to avoid crossfire. Do I get it? No. But it was funnier than heck.
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“War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.”
It’s also when your women are raped, because a government wants to make women fear them, just like the rape by instrumentation that some states have implemented. And if you don’t think that is to instill fear in women, you’re just ignoring the obvious.
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It is also rape when women are knowingly kept in ignorance of what they are doing to benefit a multi million dollar industry and the fact that it allows sex to flow freely to those men who are smart enough to ignore the consequences. There, have we extended the metaphor enough? In your rape by instrumentation, you have perhaps forgotten that an abortion entails putting instruments into a woman’s private and either injecting a burning saline solution, or a blade to dismember the fetus in uterus. A woman submitting to a procedure of that magnitude SHOULD know what she is destroying, even if she’s been convinced she doesn’t want to see it.
In fact, a woman should be treated as an adult and not as a sort of retarded child who can be led to do this or that, ‘because it’s easier deary, don’t think about it.” Which is, of course, how you would rather treat women. And which is what set off my entire rant because the idiots bleating in unison about war on women fall into your hands.
BUT none of that was a point of this post, as you well know. Unable to counter the post you’re bringing up anecdotal bullshit on STATE legislation to justify a “WAR” on the gender that’s favored. Let’s have a show of hands, how many men would submit to the equivalent of a transvaginal ultrasound to be allowed to be fathers to that “product of conception” in whose life they have no say? Or to be allowed to get out of paying child support for the child they never wanted? Or to have the sort of allowances made for them that schools make for girls? Or not to be treated like criminals because they’re men? Or because?
You see, you have no cause. All you have are talking points and a never ending amount of bile and attempted guilt-slinging, which you then use to get power over men AND women. The fact that what you’re doing is destroying society, humanity and the millenia-long slog of civilization means nothing to you. The fact that it will end in starvation blood and death means nothing to you. You’ll have your power. Well then, continue repeating the same meaningless anecdotes and slogans which btw, have been endlessly repeated in this thread, and continue flogging your “victimhood sheep” Why don’t you. After all you’ve chosen to reign in hell.
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So well articulated. I think I luv you
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Dispatches from the battlefield:
The Silent Sorority
Some women have had it with their liberal-approved counterparts.
By Lisa Fabrizio
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/03/21/the-silent-sorority
Is There a War On Women?
by Andrew Klavan
http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2012/03/19/is-there-a-war-on-women/?singlepage=true
Richard Gere: Pretty Woman a ‘silly romantic comedy’
Richard Gere has described Pretty Woman, one of the most popular films of all time, as a “silly romantic comedy and the “least favourite” of his movies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9158072/Richard-Gere-Pretty-Woman-a-silly-romantic-comedy.html
‘SexTrafficking.com’
Enslaved girls for sale on Village Voice Media site
By KIRSTEN POWERS
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/sextrafficking_com_A9mZpneScfSJIZQmvGIYOL
Mebbe we had better smack the horse again, I think I saw it flinch.
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Sarah, I love women like you very much. That the New Left would turn women into my enemy would very much confound me for the rest of my days. While I battle in Afghanistan, I thank you and women like you very much for keeping the homefires burning for when I return:)
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