laceblade

Abortion Disclaimer!!
If you decide to comment on this post, please focus your thoughts on the topic at hand. The subject of the post is about HOW abortion is discussed, not on the morality of abortion itself. Please keep your personal feelings about whether abortion is right/wrong to your own blog.

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I picked up Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism from the library, and wasn't a huge fan. Rants are sometimes cool in blogs, but I guess I expected a higher caliber of analysis, and didn't get it. Of course, there were a couple of quotes in particular that sent me into a fiery rage.

Don't have sex with someone who is anti-choice - They have no respect for your body or your ability to make decisions for yourself.

Where is this "no respect" for a woman's body coming from? Desecration of a body is a serious wrong, and it's exactly what concerns many pro-life people about abortion - this discarding of one body in favor of another. The issue of abortion is weighty and important. I don't think anybody denies this. People who decide to have abortions are not flippant about it, even though they are deeply concerned for their bodies. Likewise, people who decide not to have abortions do not think "Well, I have to have this baby and that's that." Maybe their lives will suck more. It's a serious decision that women grapple with; I think that both the pro-life crowd and the pro-choice crowd can agree on that. Neither choice is easy.

I guess my point is that being pro-life is not about a lack of respect for the female body. Maybe it is for some pro-lifers - we are obviously not all the same. But I would seriously hope that none of you would dare to think that the female body is something I have no respect for, seeing as I occupy one myself. I view pregnant women and the babies they carry like Russian nesting dolls. There isn't just one body to be valued and respected: there are two.

Does this mean that I am not worthwhile enough to have sex with simply because I am pro-life? What a simplistic and awful thing to say!

Remember that anti-choicers, at the heart of it, are just folks who are horrified at the idea of pre-marital sex. They're not the arbiters of morality, just a bunch of folks who think girls should be forever virgins.

I see this all the time, and I find its placement in this book shocking, considering that Valenti spends most of the book deconstructing common straw arguments that people use against feminists, like "All feminists are ugly" and double standards and the like.

Where is her critical thinking here?! At the heart of it, pro-lifers are a bunch of haters who are disgusted by the idea of pre-marital sex, who think that women must always remain virgins?

I just....GAH. Not all of us are blindly shaking our moralistic fingers, okay? I guess I'm just disappointed in the author because she spends the entire book deconstructing statements that are easy to say, but pass your opponent off as a straw person by shaming them. But then she gos and pulls the same bullshit. Supposedly, the book should convince women to be feminists, but if I wasn't already a feminist, I would be so insulted that it wouldn't get me very far.

I am sick of feeling insulted wherever I go. In church, I feel like I'm walking on glass because someone might say something anti-gay that pisses me off, but I feel the exact same way when I'm at Room of One's Own or Wiscon or with feminist friends and people start talking about "those religious people."