Sometimes when I’m having a stressful day at work, I’ll spend five (or fifteen) minutes looking at pictures of adorable dogs on The Daily Puppy or Cute Overload. If I happen to be working at home on a particularly stressful day, I go one better and spend an inordinate amount of time staring at, playing with, and generally annoying my perpetually sleepy and rumpled Shih Tzu. But look at that picture – can you really blame me?
After reading about Mississippi’s proposed Amendment 26, which would define a fertilized egg as a legal person, I had to wonder if that state’s legislators were taking a similar routine a bit too far. After all, babies are cute, and staring at pictures of babies is a fun distraction from a crappy economy, so why not just talk about babies and hypothetical babies all the time instead of actually working to improve our country’s myriad problems, pretty much none of which have anything to do with private decisions about pregnancy? [Read more...]
The Little Blue Party Pill: Sex, Boners, and Lots of Viagra
Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post comes from Saira Khan. Saira currently works in publishing but dedicates her free time to social commentary on her personal blog. She is a soon to be Master of Science candidate at Columbia University. Follow her on twitter @sairakh.
In the past two years we’ve seen an onslaught of Republican led bills to limit women’s access to safe and affordable abortions, cheap birth control, and health care. A recent Kansas bill allows doctors to lie to women in order to prevent abortions including lying about breast cancer treatments. They’re also trying to add a 6.3% tax to abortions even for rape victims. This is just one in a slew of bills we’re seeing red states draft in order to deny women the right to choose and deny them access to affordable contraception.
But it’s not just birth control and abortion that are under attack. Women and their sexuality are now in the spotlight. After the whole Limbaugh-Fluke fiasco, Bill O’Reilly went ahead and aligned himself with the likes of Limbaugh by stating “You Want Me To Give You My Hard-Earned Money So You Can Have Sex?” To sum it up: they don’t want women getting abortions, they don’t want to help women who choose not to have an abortion, and they don’t want women using birth control. Basically, they don’t want women having any sort of sex whatsoever unless it’s to procreate. What’s interesting about all these discussions is: where the hell are the men? Somehow conservatives make it sound like women get pregnant all by their slutty selves and then recklessly get abortions. Seriously though, where are the men in this equation? Oh yeah, they’re out there having lots of sex and getting cheap and easy erections…
Not only are men entirely excluded from this whole we’re not paying for you to have sex conversation, men and their overuse and abuse of Viagra is actually defended! The common excuse I hear in defense of the little blue pill is “well, Viagra is life-giving.” So, really what it comes down to is that they seem to believe men can have as much sex as they want because, you know, they’re men. And somehow birth control promotes sex and Viagra promotes, what, abstinence?
Let’s clear a few things up here about Viagra. [Read more...]