Teh Crazy Continues

We've got the Aurora shooter, and the insane religious claiming it happened because we're not suckered enough into their interpretation of Christianity.  We've got the Penn State sanctions and punishments from the NCAA, since all of a sudden making football a religion is not such a good idea.  Then we have the reich-wing lowering their booms on President Obama because he dared to notice that successful businesses didn't get their by their own efforts entirely.

Who pays for the roads? Or the fire department? Or the police? Or the schools who turn out the workers? Who subsidizes the fuel people need to drive to work? Who trained the bricklayers, HVAC technicians, cement-layers, drywall erectors, engineers who designed and programmed production?

For those who grasp onto the notion that a successful business got there all by themselves, please think again. A business is only successful when its owners clambered on top of the shoulders of many, many others. And they can stay there only when many, many others continue to support their aims.

I imagine that the remaining months to this November's election will be laced with (and fraught with) partial truths ... half-truths would be a bonus. Just expect 'teh crazy' to be the soup du jour, and spend some time breathing in order to sort out what's real and what is simply crazy.

Attention All Penises

A couple using no birth control has an 85 percent chance of becoming pregnant in one year. The Agriculture Department estimates that on average, middle-income couples spend around $12,500 per year per child.

Famous statue showing a penis

To my female readers, this post is not exactly for you except if your significant penis, err other, is one of those dittoheads who believe the consequences of having sex fall solely and squarely on the shoulders and in the uterus of a woman. Hopefully you can pick up a tip or two to better train that penis, err, person.

To my male readers who recognize that family planning is a basic and necessary part of 21st century life, and who support their women, and who believe insurance companies must not discriminate when it comes to women's health care, then I salute you and apologize in advance for any squirming you experience reading this post.

To the rest of you penises: it is proven fact that men's sex drive is far stronger than women's. In my own experience, women most actively seek a sexual partner when they are ready for motherhood.  Women tend to evaluate the men in their life by this criteria: will they make good fathers, good helpers, good providers?  Let's just say that men think about and want to have sexual intercourse far more often and over many more years than women do.

Sperm flow in the million

Here's one explanation. Men can produce millions of sperm cells every month.  A woman of childbearing age produces maybe an egg or two a month.  Right there you have a biological reason for the disparity between a male's and female's sex drive.

There's also a social explanation.  Men seem to have a compelling need to be seen as virile.  Women, on the other hand, have no compulsion to prove they are the flip side of virile.  I can find no equivalent of virility as it relates to women, except for the notion of fertility.  Women don't have to prove fertility, it is assumed.  Men are expected to exude testosterone among their friends and associates in order to confirm and solidify their status as men.

So here we come to the bottom line.  For those penises who believe that it should fall to the woman to regulate her own menses and be solely responsible for her own possible pregnancies, think about this.  If a woman deserves no assistance for planning her pregnancies, then a woman has every right to refuse to participate in coitus. And I'm willing to bet that has a greater impact on men than women.

Missionary style, doggie style, any number of Kama Sutra styles… basically any style that places a dribbling-with-semen penis in proximity to a moist, fertile vagina should be avoided by the woman at all costs unless she is seeking motherhood.  But women and especially men still end up having sex in the absence of a desire to procreate.  So, what are a woman's choices in a world without family planning?  Take the Santorum-sanctioned one-man and one-woman marriage, for example.  Does a woman have a right within such a union to say 'NO' night after night, month after month?  If not, isn't that woman really just a sex slave to her husband's desires?

Heterosexual men, are you ready for a life of sitting in your computer chairs, typing with one hand?  Or being shut down by your wives or girlfriends night after night?  All I'm saying is, think about it.  Unfortunately, being gay is not a choice so you're kind of stuck.

And women, unless you really want a life dictated and dominated by men's spermy urges, it is time to take a stand against the troglodytes who now insist on making it difficult or impossible for you to be in charge of your own reproductive system.  How else to make that statement that we, as women, will not go back to the days before Roe v. Wade, before contraception, than to write it plainly and simply?

 

It's up to us, sisters. 

My Body, My Health, My Vagina, My Uterus

As long as pregnancy remained the defining fact of our lives, [men] got to run the whole show.
Sarah Robinson at Alternet

I pity the fools who are playing politics with us women. They may not have intended to waken a normally tranquil majority, but it's too late now to reverse course. If they think we will quietly return to the middle of the 20th century, I think they're in for a big surprise.

Here's my belly, see my fire, feel my power, fear my ire
(original painting by Ennealogic)

Pro-Choice GOP Warns Party That Contraception Fight Will Be A Disaster [TPM]

But will the GOP listen? Apparently they hope to entice a certain segment of the population to the polls with their hollow accusations of trampled religious liberties.  "'This was an unexpected gift,' said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a Republican strategist." [NYTimes]

5 Important Lessons from the Komen/Planned Parenthood Fiasco (Don't Mess With Women's Health) [Alternet]

Via online poll at Forbes as of 2/18/2012

Still smarting after the Komen-Planned Parenthood public relations disaster, theocratic men of the cloth and their sycophantic zealots in politics continue to find new ways to insult, demean, and brush aside the women of America by trivializing reproductive health concerns and issues.

During the recent ludicrous Senate hearing chaired by Darrell Issa, Connecticut Bishop William Lori compared providing contraception coverage in health care plans to forcing kosher delis to serve pork [WSJ].  Excuse me, Bishop, but pork is not medicine no matter how stretched the analogy.  And President Obama's plan doesn't force you or your brothers in self-righteous holiness to supply prescription birth control.

Foster Friess, GOP hopeful Rick Santorum's chief financial backer, callously joked that contraception is cheap: all it takes is a woman holding an aspirin between her knees [Atlantic].

Santorum himself made it plain that contraception is a wicked invention. "Many in the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.' It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." [CaffeinatedThoughts]


The Increasingly Disturbing War Against Women's Rights [TNR]

With an improving economy and a competent and compassionate captain at the helm (thank you, President Obama) the opponents of progress have wagered their political futures (and that of their Greedy Old Perverts party) on social issues: marriage equality, reproductive choice, and breathtakingly, women's rights in general.


If they want war, they'll have it. Who's with me?

Image credit: Progress NC

---

More reading:

• Senate Republicans Push to Weaken Violence Against Women Act
• Oklahoma Senate Approves Bill That Declares Life Begins At Conception
• Virginia's Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination