I was so incensed by a blog posting by LiL, I wrote a 2,100 word entry myself. So go read her posting, then come back here and read mine. What inspired her post was a New York Times article about the abortion provision tacked on to the latest Congressional spending bill.
LiL’s post surprised me because I have always found her arguments to be open-minded, articulate, tolerant, and quite enjoyable. I re-read her post multiple times, thinking that I was missing something or misinterpreting the argument, but found troubling the way that she tried to frame the abortion debate as a “men versus women” issue, then extrapolated from a few specific examples, and then made generalizations about my gender and those who are against abortion. While she admits that her gender-based generalizations were crude and offensive, she posted them anyway even though they did little to support the original premise. I apologize if it appears that I am unfairly targeting her or her post, it is just that I care about her opinion a great deal and felt that this post reflected a distortion of the abortion debate that I find all too common.
I will first try to address the abortion provision of the spending bill (the easier part), and then I will try to tackle the rest of her post (not so easy).
The spending bill was passed by the way, with the House agreeing to a separate vote on the provision next year. However, it makes me absolutely LIVID when members of Congress try to sneak unrelated, controversial line items into an essential bill. This cowardly, undemocratic practice attempts to short-circuit honest debate and then usually serves as political fodder in the next election against candidates who chose to vote against a beneficial measure in order to block such line items.
That aside, while I agree with the spirit of this provision, the barriers that it would raise against low-income women in need of an abortion are unacceptable. Using federal funding to coerce health care providers into violating the tenets of their religion and/or their interpretation of the Hippocratic oath is wrong, but the reality is that woman have a legal right to an abortion in this country, and chipping away at Roe v. Wade in this manner solves nothing. Sorry to be somewhat non-committal here, but I see no easy solution to this conundrum (I certainly cannot arrive at a solution after less than 24 hours of reflection), which is why open, honest debate on this issue is so essential.
Don’t get me wrong—I believe that abortion is always wrong, but there are certain conditions under which bringing a child into the world is also wrong. When faced with these two wrongs, there (obviously) is no right choice. We as a society have to, among other things, provide adequate funding and a vastly improved social services system to allow bringing an “unwanted child” into this world to be an easier decision. Top down legislation and unfunded, short-sighted mandates may temporarily reduce the number of premature infants who needlessly lose their lives, but the burden to society and the criminalization of women who, quite honestly, have no other legitimate option would be a far greater tragedy.
I am SICK and TIRED of the incessant framing of the abortion debate as baby-killers versus Neanderthal women-haters, Christians versus heathens, “pro-choice” versus “pro-life,” men versus women. We are so caught up with ad hominum arguments, meaningless euphemisms, and demonization of the other; that we will never get to the root of the abortion problem. Meanwhile, over a million and a half American premature infants lose their lives to abortion every year.
Now back to LiL’s post.
We arrive at the basic premise of the post, that the abortion debate once again boils down to the “stupidly proverbial battle between men and women” because all of the women quoted in the New York Times article were opposed to the abortion provision, and all of the men (crusty, old white guys that they are) supported it. Frankly, I am only willing to draw the following possible three conclusions. The two NYT reporters decided that to interview male members of Congress who opposed the provision was inconsistent with the way they chose to spin their article. There are not enough female “conservatives” in Congress. There are not enough females in Congress, period.
Continuing on, the difficulties that LiL and Julee Lacey (and many others) have faced at their respective pharmacies trying to obtain Plan B and other birth control pills is reprehensible. I cannot agree with LiL more here. I fully blame the more extreme fringes of the anti-abortion movement. The anti-contraception “every sperm is sacred” argument was quite rightfully parodied by Monty Python; it is patently ridiculous, and I will not waste further space here on such a ludicrously extreme take on the “when does life begin” argument.
As for the morning after pill (Plan B), this is where the anti-abortion movement has got to compromise—and enough with the disinformation campaign already. Plan B is not RU486; I can’t believe how many are mislead into believing this. The hyperdose of hormones in Plan B either prevents ovulation, fertilization, or implantation; it does not abort a fetus because there is no fetus yet. Actively educating women (and men) about emergency contraception, increasing funding to provide it to low-income women, removing barriers to conveniently obtaining Plan B from pharmacies, and removing the stigma associated with this method of contraception can go a long way toward reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
To summarize the next part of her post—menstruation and pregnancy are so much more than a minor inconvenience. OK. Both are painful and expensive, and childbirth is especially traumatic to a woman’s body. OK I fully agree; childbirth prematurely ages a woman’s body quite a few years and is something that a woman never fully recovers from. LiL does not quite make the following argument (she comes close, though), but I have heard it repeated so many times that I thought it appropriate to bring it up here. This argument states that a man’s opinion on abortion is less valid because we can never know the pain and inconvenience of menstruation or childbirth. Granted, this is a pain that I can never experience; at most I can only be empathetic and supportive of the women in my life when they go through it, but this does not mean that I less capable of examining the issue from all sides and making an informed, open-minded decision.
I was once strongly opposed to abortion under any circumstances, not because I had a low opinion of women or viewed women as mere sperm receptacles, but because I took an absolutist view of the maxim “thou shall not kill.” To me the life of the premature infant was all that mattered, the woman’s life and/or the woman’s “convenience” was secondary. For people to say that I arrived at this perspective because of a lack of respect for women as anything other than as a sexual object is insulting, and it fails to realize and respect that sometimes a man’s thoughts and experiences are quite different from their own or what they misperceive a man’s perspective to be like. The experience that most significantly initially shaped my view against abortion was my mother (who still holds an absolutist view against abortion) describing how my biological father tried to psychologically bully her into having an abortion and killing the baby that she had already grown quite attached to, thus snuffing out the wonderfully unique combination of 46 chromosomes that grew up into yours truly. Thank God she had the strength of personality and an adequate support system at home to compensate for the fact that she was a terrified teenage girl (still in high school) from a low-income, single-mother family.
Unfortunately, for many extremists on the pro-abortion side of things, only the converse to the above perspective is true—the child is a sub-human glob of cells or a parasite (Dworkinesque view) and his or her “life” is irrelevant. My view today is that both the life of the mother and the life of the child must be equally considered. Although all life is sacred, we do not live in an ideal world, and sometimes an abortion is a woman’s only option. Her choice is most definitely a wrong one, but it is my Christian responsibility to be forgiving, understanding, and non-judgmental with regard to the difficult decision that she had to make.
However, as long as “pro-choice” activists continue to erroneously dismiss the absolutist view against abortion as anti-feminist (attacking the person, not the viewpoint), any consensus or movement toward mitigating the problem of abortion is impossible.
Anyway, throughout the rest of the LiL’s posting, she mentions a few specific examples of men who did not respect her feelings or those of her friends. These men tried to impose their sexual desires upon the women in their lives, treating them like objects, and betraying a mutual trust because they were completely insensitive to the vastly different female perspective. I will not dispute that the men that she mentions are complete asses, not just because of the persistence of their harassment, but because of their blatant disrespect for the sanctity of marriage. Human beings can be remarkable insensitive toward one another, regardless of their gender.
It seems we have some common ground here, after all, and as such, I will paraphrase LiL’s very own words. You see, I, as a man, “have needs, feelings, whathaveyou” that lots of women don’t realize I have simply because I am not a woman, and they can only think of those from the point of view of being a woman.
I have found so many woman (and men, of course) who are so wrapped up in themselves that they are oblivious and insensitive to the negative emotional impact that their actions can have on members of the opposite sex around them.
Society (and women) expect men to be the sexual aggressor, the initiator of the mating dance. If a man is not aggressive, woman perceive him as dull or lacking confidence or relegate him to the unenviable role of platonic male friend (PMF). If I develop an affection for a woman and hit on her, it is not because I am only capable of framing her as a sexual object, it is because I am desperately searching for a compatible partner, a friend with whom I could see sharing the rest of my life, and a woman who stimulates me physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In the rare instances that I find such a creature, it is very hard to let go when the other person either does not feel the same way or is completely unwilling to even explore the possibility of being with me.
Upon rejection, I have always tried to fully respect her decision, and I have usually attempted to maintain a friendship with the object of my affection. If one has never tried this, let me tell you that it is exceedingly difficult. You die a little inside each time you see this person; this death by a thousand pangs can accumulate until you are left a passionless husk (some days are worse than others). In the worst case scenario, she misperceives your overtures of friendship as a pathetic attempt to win her affection or as a clueless ego-driven inability to accept the reality of the rejection, and lashes back at you, filled with hostility. This very scenario played out in my life over ten years ago, and it took me years to fully recover (if you are out there somewhere, Alison, I am sorry for any pain I caused you).
Upon rejection (and believe me, I have plenty of experience with this), I will make every attempt to respect a woman’s boundaries, and will never cross that line again unless explicitly invited (I do not consider subtle signals and mind games to be an explicit invitation). I find it hard to believe that more members of my gender do not feel the same way.
My reason for embarking on this tangent is to beseech the women out there to not let a few bad experiences with overly aggressive slimeballs color your perception of my gender too much or lead you to make less-than-flattering broad-based generalizations about the average man’s inability to appreciate how a woman experiences reality.
I apologize if my two-thousand–word missive seems a bit rambling, or if I did not properly articulate my viewpoints. It is just that I am dead tired—both from ten hours of writing and from the incessant male-bashing, Christian-bashing, and Republican-bashing I read on so many blogs.
Mike (not Mike?) I found your trackback via Lil’s blog. This post is rather long so I may or may not read it all but your thought, “However, it makes me absolutely LIVID when members of Congress try to sneak unrelated, controversial line items into an essential bill” is something I’m interested in because apart from the argument about the bill or the argument about abortion, I’ve seen several references in the media to this item being “snuck in” and I’ve also read a bit that disproves this.
How can we know for certain that the bill was manipulated based upon the media representation and the quotes from congressional representatives?
I can’t always identify with everything I read either. People have different experiences and the truly passionate people who are able to articulate those sometimes display the scars that got them there.
If I’m reading your entry correctly, you seem to feel offended by blame appropriated for men. I think that’s an easy thing for women to do or men to do for that matter (except that men don’t talk as much about emotional issues so maybe we don’t find it as much in their writing). Ooh, maybe I’m making this worse.
And regardless of my own thoughts, that’s not my intent.
For a lot of women, it’s more than “a few” bad experiences with slimeballs. And for every bad experience you can laugh and blog about, there’s ten or twenty moments when you’re talking and all of a sudden realize that he’s staring at your breasts, or you get excited about whatever it is that you’re saying and he suddenly thinks you’re flirting, etc.
I certainly don’t think men are incapable of empathizing with women, but I do wonder at the kind of society that allows so many to live without even trying.
Certainly, that’s a given, Yami, but is that any reason to exclude men from the conversation about what’s wrong with things? To do so would be obviously stereotypical. If they’re alienated by posts, how can there be any interactive discourse?
I did not mean to include anyone from this conversation. Nor would I ever claim that I’m fully aware of what any other person thinks or feels. In the post that incensed you so much, Michael, I was merely trying to make a point, and if it incensed you, then quite possibly I made it.
I emphatically have to disagree with what you say that men have an equal stake in what happens to a pregnancy (though we’re harping on an issue here which I seriously think is reducing a complex of many other issues to a single, rather flawed point). However. I cannot see how any person other than myself can be trusted to make decisions about my life and my body. And the baby lives in the woman’s body in a fairly parasitic relationship and there’s little that can be argued about that one. And ya’ll know how much I love children and want them too - so I’m not saying this because I’m categorically against the idea of being a mother. In fact, I’m not talking about when a pregnancy occurs in a relationship where there is space for discussion on this point. I’m talking about someone alone, someone for whom there is no one to turn to, someone in whose case the father of the child isn’t and will never be involved - and these are women about whom male (yes: male, look at the persons, and I don’t just mean the ones named in the NYT article) legislators, who never cared about them and never will, make decisions and try to constrain the amount of autonomy they have about their lives.
And I think you’re missing my point about the sexual harrassment example I wrote - and even a few slimeballs can scar you for a long time, as you say yourself. And this initiating the mating dance thing - that’s another problem I see in society. I don’t think that’s a realistic way of looking at it, because in the end, it isn’t quite about who starts what. The starting things is usually far more nebulous. And my take on the platonic friendship is that they happen when people are not each other’s types. Notice I said each other’s: one might be the other’s type but not vice versa. Sad, but true. Otherwise it would not be a platonic relationship. I think I wrote about this before.
Also, the few slimeballs that affect a woman badly really scar women for life, and most women (among them myself) absolutely do not extend the distrust towards them towards all men in the world. But, like you (though I think you don’t mean to do this) people always suggest that one is just hypersensitive and can’t deal with one’s feelings. Which is, quite frankly, dismissive and hurtful. And the reality is that these things happen to women on such a large scale that being suspicious of men is actually, in the end, warranted. I mean, in just the last few months, one of my friends was almost raped and another one was in a fairly serious sexual harrassment situation (I’m not sharing the details but it really was not funny at all). I wrote about the first incident a while back and I was amazed at how many stories of little instances of undocumented sexual abuse in public places etc. cane out in the comments and on other people’s blogs. Things women don’t talk about because they don’t want to be perceived as hysterical. But clearly, if so many women had some story they remembered very vividly (I mean, I only wrote down one, but cripes, there have been more than I can count), this is something that leaves a pretty lasting mark - and it is also very, very prevalent. Frighteningly so. And yet shoved under the carpet because it’s just women being overly sensitive or hysterical or unreasonable. So we’re ashamed to talk about it, and how it shapes our view of male-female interaction, because - well look how you’re reacting. Even you imply that my reaction is unreasonable, even as you admit to how much just one woman mistreating you scarred you - so why is it such a stretch from there to what I’m writing about? All I’m saying is, something is very broken in our society if these things are considered the norm. They shouldn’t be.
Okay correction: I meant to write “I did not mean to exclude anyone from this conversation.) I switched the sentence around halfway through and lo and behold it got messed up.
And as I was thinking some more about something you say: “it is very hard to let go when the other person either does not feel the same way or is completely unwilling to even explore the possibility of being with me.”
Sure, that’s really rough. But why do you think there are two scenarios there: 1. person not feeling the same way and 2. person is unwilling to explore something with you. It seems to me the two things are one and the same: that the person does not feel the same way and therefore does not want to be in a relationship with you. All of us have to deal with this at one point or another, and usually many times.
Generalizations are hard. By nature they’re inaccurate and even a little exclusionary, but then, they’re so helpful! Complex systems just can’t be analyzed without making a great many simplifying assumptions, and people will always disagree about what’s oversimplifying and what isn’t. Does civil discourse require that we never make a generalization that might hurt someone’s feelings? You can argue that if you’d like, but I’d say it’s possible to create a space in which one can generalize while acknowledging that not everyone fits the mold, that the mold is a product of anger and frustration with a set of experiences and a way of drawing conclusions about the meaning of those experiences without extending those conclusions to the whole wide world beyond experience.
Michael, you probably didn’t mean it this way, but here’s how I read your penultimate paragraph:
You are asking that we value your perception of how men feel over our own perceptions of how men act. You’re characterizing our stories about dump trucks full of disrespect as just “a few bad experiences”. I hope you can understand why this trivialization is potentially as hurtful as an over-broad generalization.
Michelle, I’m not going to bend over backwards to make sure my feminism is pleasing to men. On personal blogs in particular, there should be space for griping and venting, as well as for courteous discussion; most of the time it’s not too hard to tell which is which. When we cross a line we should be called on it, but if letting our frustration show at the seams now and then is too much for the poor widdle men…well, crikey, what kind of interactive discourse could we really have?
Yikes, my comments exploded overnight. In the short time that I have before I leave for work, I will try to make some rushed general comments. Then after work, I will try to address comments one by one. I knew that I was asking for trouble by posting such a controversial article, but I felt many of the things that I said needed to be said.
The main point that I tried to make with my post (I guess not as well as I thought) was that we are never going to reach any consensus on the issue of abortion as long as we continue to try to separate each other into polarized camps (esp. men versus women), and then make the wrong assumptions about why members of the other side believe what they believe based on our own limited experiences.
There are men and woman on both sides of the debate. There are also feminists on both sides. And there are so many shades of gray in between. All men who are opposed to abortion are not misogynists.
Many of us, for now, will have to agree to disagree on the issue of whether men and women have an equal stake in what happens with a pregnancy. It is not just “my life, my body.” With a pregnancy, it is “two lives, two bodies,” with one member of that relationship unavoidably dependent on the other for his or her continued existence. The responsibility for protecting that life extends beyond the woman. I will try to expound on this later.
My discussion about rejection and respecting women’s boundaries veered off into an inappropriately personal tangent. The morning after, re-reading it, I am not even sure what point I was really trying to make. If possible, I will try to restate my point later.
What I was trying to say with my penultimate paragraph was that please do not marginalize my opinions as a man just because so many other men in your lives have thought and acted like complete slimeballs. I weep for my gender if these slimeballs are representative of the “average man.” I do understand that the actions of these men have tended to create an extremely oppressive environment for women. It is not my intent to trivialize the negative effects that these jerks have had on woman’s lives, but please try not to punish those of us men who do treat women with respect.
The thing about your post is that you used very controversial language. “Preborn infant”? And a fetus, to the best of my knowledge, does not give anything to the woman as a symbiotic relationship would suggest.
You can argue about two lives and how everyone has a responsibility to a pregnant woman, and perhaps they do, but no one lives up to these responsibilities. Because you’re asking a lot: 40% of women will have serious health issues due to pregnancy. They’ll lose time from work, only a little if they’re lucky, many weeks if they’re unlucky. We have PPD issues afterwards. These costs are all on the woman’s body, and on her life.
Men do have a stake in pregnancy. But it’s just not an equal stake. They’re never going to get pregnant. Fair or unfair, right or wrong: this is the case. (At least until we have major changes in technology.) You will have a bigger stake in your significant other’s pregnancy than I will, but as a general concern, not.
I’m avoiding arguing about personhood and life and what should be valued where. Because the reality is that if abortion is illegal, we will end up with a few things happening. We will have DIY abortions, which end in all sorts of bad. We will have women being taken to back-alley abortion clinics where they can say no all they want but it won’t matter — right now, you need to give actual consent. You will have middle class and rich women getting safe abortions anyhow, by going to Canada or London or the clinics that are bound to spring up just outside teh US. What you will end up with is even more poor women having unwanted children, even more teenage girls asking their boyfriends to hit them on the stomach so they miscarry.
No one likes high abortion rates. There are ways that people can work together to lower the rates. But quite honestly, if someone wants to make abortion illegal before these provisions are in place (I disagree with it afterwards as well, but think it’s a more reasonable discussion then), then it sounds like it’s all about punishing women. (Why not make men give DNA at birth, so that we have a national databank so that we always know who the father is? That’s much less a violation of bodily integrity than pregnancy. I can think of all sorts of examples.)
I realized 30 minutes after I posted my comment that “symbiotic” was the wrong word to use and edited my comment, but not before wolfangel made her comment.
I concede that men do not have an equal stake in pregnancy, but they do have some stake, and too many completely ignore that consideration.
I’ll have to table this for later; I’m late for work.
Independently, discussion on the men against women issue.
There are all sorts of things that suck about the social structure we have, and some of them suck for men, and some of them suck for women. And not many people truly think all men are (x) or all women are (y). But at some point, it’s fair to take your experiences and use them, and say, look, here are politicians — mostly men — who want to punish me for having sex but not wanting a child now, and this is similar to men who’ve punished me for working with them, or not wanting to date them, and this appears like a devaluing of women — either as just sex objects or just incubators.
As Lil said, at some point you need to accept that women acting distrustful of men is not just hating men, it’s basing it on experience. I’m very uncomfortable if it’s just me and some strange man in a parking lot alone at night, and for all that it’s likely that they also were doing something late, I still appreciate some courtesy (which means, essentially, staying away).
And as Yami says: we’re allowed to vent, and complain about our frustrations.
You know Michael, the point I was trying to make is actually the one you mention in one of the comments above:
“that we are never going to reach any consensus on the issue of abortion as long as we continue to try to separate each other into polarized camps (esp. men versus women)”
And then you go on to dismiss personal experience. At some point though, it is important to think about how larger trends impact personal experience, and frankly, anti-feminism is one that impacts women’s personal experience tremendously. Of course, as your post shows, it also impacts men’s personal experience, and creates these bitter situations where everyone feels personally under attack. Which, to my mind, also shows how important it is to bring the issue of personal experience into the debate about larger trends. And no, it won’t be fair, but - well as a woman, too many times I’m asked to be “rational” about something and argue a point and make absolutely no reference to plenty of personal experiences which are just screaming that the rational vocabulary available for making the argument is so incomplete that the argument pretty much can’t even be made.
On the point of men having a stake in pregnancy: you’re talking about the ideal scenario. About the decent boyfriend/sexual partner who will indeed not just dismiss you completely if the encounter has unintented consequences. And the reality is that whether pregnancy or STDs, in heterosexual encounters it is by far more often the woman who comes away with the unintended consequences. Now, the caring man (and you’re right: there are very many of these) will want not only to know about these things but be part of the decisions made. With this kind of a man, I think it’s safe to say that most women would not make any decision without involving them.
That’s not the kind of man I’m talking about. I mean the kind who is barely there to begin with or has abused a woman. But let’s just stick to the more average kinds of situations: casual encounters after which the woman is left to deal with the consequences alone - well, in that case I really don’t see why it should be anyone’s decision but mine, given that my life is the one primarily impacted by the consequences anyway.
Pregnancy, when wanted, is a wonderful thing, and treasured and cherished despite all the heath risks and pain and whatnot, and the new life feeding off of one is loved from the moment it’s there. But when it isn’t wanted, it’s something that fills a lot of women with panic and resentment and dread - because there’s this being insisting on using one’s body against one’s will. This is not a matter of life or not life, I think. Rather: is it okay for one human being to use another’s body that other’s will? We’ve pretty much established that it’s not okay for one adult to use another’s body against that other’s will. So why is it okay for a fetus to do so?
Ah, lunchtime…now I just want to add one clarification. I do not begrudge anyone their right to express their frustrations on their blogs, in fact I do a great deal of venting on my own. And I don’t think that anyone should feel badly if they unintentially offend someone in a post; that is a natural part of civil discourse.
Sure I was incensed, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It inspired me to write my own posting and share my perspectives on these issues. I doubt that my post convinced anyone toward my point of view (esp. w/ such a hot-button issue), but that is fine. I am flattered that so many took the time to read my post, and that you now may understand a little better how I view the world around me. I wholeheartedly welcome your perspectives as well.
I will continue to read and enjoy all of your blogs, whether I agree with what you post or not.
LiL, thank you for your latest comment, I am starting to understand some of the confusion over my post, due to a poor articulation on my part.
I am in no way dismissing personal experience as a basis of opinion on these important issues; on the contrary, I value it highly. What I am dismissing is the use of personal experience to make a broad-based generalization about a class of people and then using that generalization to make assumptions about the reasons a member of that class supports or opposes a certain issue.
My offense at your post was due to the way I strung together your arguments in support of your third paragraph (and I’m sorry if I was way off base). In your post you mention instances where men selfishly and insensitively acted atrociously toward women, showing deep blindness for their independent feelings, desires, and perspectives.
However, in your third paragraph, you mention “all these men,” which I took to mean the male senators who supported the abortion provision, demonstrate by their position on this issue that they merely view woman as objects, as sperm vessels who must bear the consequences of their sexual act.
While I agree that many of these senators (and some other opponents of abortion) have patriarchal, condescending attitudes toward woman, it is a dangerous oversimplification to jump to conclusions about the reason someone is opposed to abortion. I would posit that for many of these senators, they may not have considered all sides of this issue as well as they should have, but their support of the provision has no basis in misogyny.
In this past election, far too many people made erroneous assumptions about why people voted for Bush—they are stupid, they let their religion influence their vote, etc. You and I were both bothered by this because we understood that the reasons those people ended up voting for Bush were much more complex than that.
Same thing here. The underlying reasons for abortion opposition are enormously complex, and over-simplified, condescending assumptions about their motivations will only serve to alienate them, close them off, and make it far more difficult for them to come to a consensus.
As for abortion as a privacy issue (“keep your laws off of my body,” etc.), this one is very difficult for me (so be patient with me :-) ), and I will try to expound on why later, but I have to get back to work.
The thing is that if you voted for Bush because of the war, you’re also supporting his stance on the environment. You might not personally support it, but you’ve essentially endorsed it.
Equally, if you have a well-thought out argument against abortion, you’re supporting forcing women to be pregnant against their wishes: forcing one group of people (which you aren’t part of) to be altruistic.
So though part of me thinks yes, you can do things for all sorts of complex reasons, they often boil down to something much simpler.
I’m sure that many anti-abortion people aren’t misogynistic, and that some pro-abortion people are. (And, of course, the reverse.) The goodness or badness of the people — even the goodness or badness of their intentions — in the end won’t matter as much as the results. (This is in part because people with all sorts of different intentions sometimes act for the same thing, especially when only two solutions are broadly available.)
Generalisations are an interesting question. Because of course there’s some use in them, along with the danger. (And usefulness aside: no one ever wants to be caught in one, even if it’s accurate.)
I am technically supposed to be nursing my car over the grapevine by now… but as far as making assumptions about people’s reasons, Timothy Burke touched on this recently, and I wanted to share:
I think that for some but not all men who oppose abortion rights, an unconscious disregard for women’s lives and bodies is what fuels their position, or at least makes it more comfortable to hold without examination. If the senators haven’t considered the issue as well as they should have, and the reason they haven’t done so is because society allows them to live without developing the habit of thinking of women as full human beings, isn’t that still misogyny?
It would be wonderful to have a discussion of ways in which we can examine the tension between unconscious influences and conscious reaoning without hurting feelings or being overly exclusive. It’s a chewy topic for anyone interested in rhetoric, certainly. But the tension does exist, and we do need to examine it, and if there’s no way to do it without alienating a few people along the way, then that’s just how it has to be I guess.
Anyway, happy turkeys, all!
I have been waiting all afternoon to write this addendum to my earlier comment.
The other reason why making assumptions about people’s reasons for a certain viewpoint is dangerous to the ideals of free discourse is that it often prejudices one against the other person’s opinions.
Tolerance of another’s viewpoints and open-mindedness are essential to any rational discourse; and prejudice breeds intolerance and close-mindedness. Tolerance does not necessarily equate to acceptance, but it encourages participation for all in the “marketplace of ideas.”
Also, while having strong convictions about an issue is perfectly fine, to close oneself off completely to the possibility that one’s own opinion on a issue might be wrong or distorted is antithetical to an open debate.
Whenever I approach an argument, I always try to remain open to the idea that my beliefs and arguments might be wrong. [Chorus: Good, because you are!] Obviously, the more reprehensible the opposing viewpoint, the less consideration I have to give to my own potential wrongness. But every so often I find a grain of truth in an opinion I formerly found ridiculous, and I am able to moderate my viewpoint to something more sensible.
Back to the “marketplace of ideas” ideal (and, yes, unfortunately, it is an ideal)…because of this post I had two women e-mail me privately to share their opinions on abortion. They were reticent to post them here because they did not want to open themselves up to people “jumping down their throat” or being accused of being a “religious zealot.” Two cogent opinions lost from the marketplace because they are so used to such discussions becoming irrational and full of ad hominem attacks.
Apology: I just wanted to take a moment to apologize to all of my readers, to LiL’s readers, and to LiL herself because of the way this post crosses the line between being a commentary on a fellow blogger’s post to being a point-by-point attack against the blogger herself. I tried to avoid this, but failed.
I do believe now that I misinterpreted the overall point she was trying to make in her post.
However, I stand by one point I was trying to make (albeit not as lucidly as I thought) that attempting to frame the abortion debate as a battle between men and women is inaccurate, inflammatory, and counterproductive.
My intent was not to personally attack her, but to challenge her generalizations about my gender.
One positive side effect, the commenters here made some extremely cogent points, esp. LiL. The following statement from her last comment will keep me thinking for some time.
I, unfortunately, do not have the time to respond directly to the rest of these comments. Also, because I feel that the poor manner in which I handled my challenge to LiL’s post may have hurt a dear friend, I would just like to let this thread die out.
I admit that I’m disappointed - I had hoped to return to find that this thread had grown legs and walked around a while. Alas, that other bloggers are not merely dancing bears in my private circus! :)
Dance for Yami. Dance! Dance!
The controversial stuff is way too time consuming, though. Maybe when I have another free weekend (too much socializing this weekend)…
A sidenote about this post, though—it just started out as a mere comment to the original post, but then I kept writing and writing and writing. Before I knew it, the sun had come up, and I had this ridiculously long, rambling comment. So rather than post such a long comment on someone else’s blog, I cut and pasted it into a post on my own blog. Probably not the best of ideas, as I should have slept on it and then reworked it a bit more.
Don’t worry, though. It is only a matter of time before my impulsive nature becomes a source of future amusement.