April 17, 2005

What Is Mine
by Lorraine Berry

This is my body .



Mine. Not yours. Not the government's. Not the property of rightwing nut jobs who hate their bodies, and want to control mine, too.

In October, Jo Miller and I tried to organize an airlift of sex toys to Alabama. As we all know now, the US Supreme Court has declined to hear the case. It may seem silly to get in a huff about whether men and women in Alabama can use vibrators, but this is yet another attack on the right to privacy.
Then, there's the Kansas Attorney General who wants records of women who've had medical procedures in their third trimester of pregnancy.
Our new Attorney General would rather pursue pornographers than war criminals.
It's now okay for pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control they object to, and Plan B contraception, which is a virtual no-brainer, will never be approved for over-the-counter purchase by this administration's FDA.

One of the results of the hate initiatives passed in November, the ones that denied rights to gay people, is to strip domestic violence protection for unmarried women.

Gay couples are not allowed to adopt children in Florida.

HR 748, which would make it a crime for anyone to transport a minor without parental permission across state lines in order for said minor to have an abortion performed was passed out of Comittee this week. Given the number of states where no abortions are performed, desperate girls who seek help from trusted adults could put those adults in danger of prosecution. If a young woman is too frightened to tell her parent(s) that she's pregnant, there's probably a good reason for that.
We teach children that their bodies are disgusting, and we call it abstinence education. We deny them knowledge of contraception, and on average, they delay sex by 12 months, and when they do engage in it, they do it unprotected from disease or pregnancy.
America is turning into a kakistocracy, run by people who hate and so distrust their bodies that they seek to control ours.
Sex is unruly. Love is anarchic. Personal connections among us will keep us tied to personal loyalties, and we will be less prone to blind adherence to faceless, abstract concepts like patriotism.

I have heard progressives repeatedly offer dumping Roe v. Wade as a means of appeasing the right wing in this country so we could take our country back.
Sorry. I know it would be convenient to dump parts of us to take back the country for the left, but bodies are not negotiable. Bodies matter. They matter when they're being restricted, and they matter when they're being exterminated. And you know what? History shows us, time and time again, that those who seek to control bodies eventually want to destroy them.
What I can do with my body, what you can do with yours, and what the government tells us we can do with our bodies and to other bodies is having a pernicious effect on us. When the government tells you what you can do with your body, Abu Ghraib happens. When the government sets itself us as the arbiter of what correct sexual conduct is, hate crimes against gays happen.
How can we fight back? Well, the law student who asked Justice Scalia if he sodomized his wife was absolutely right to ask the question. It's the type of response that I've advocated in a privacy manifesto. If the control freaks do not want to answer questions about their private lives, they damn well don't get to ask about mine.
We need more concerted efforts, of course, In the next few years, we are going to have to win back the ground that's been ceded, fight back against the incursions--the penetration--of the private body by public scolds who have way too much power in this government. You could start by telling your representatives and senators that HR 748 is a violation of young women's privacy.
Crimes of power against the body: rape, gay bashing, lynching, torture, ultimately come from a government that seeks to regulate the body because of its sex, or race, or sexual orientation or desires. Our hatred of our own bodies fuels our hatred of others.
Sex and desire are not the enemy. Reading about sex and looking at photographs is not the problem. It's the self-loathing that is bred by our horrible attitudes toward our own persons that is at the heart of this.
And yes. There's a whole reading list on this topic. Foucault, Butler, for starters. Or the Bible.
But here's what I'd say. The society that can teach me to hate my body, doesn't have to teach me to hate yours.

Posted by in Bio-Power, Body, Civil Rights, Culture War, Feminism
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c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: What Is Mine I am going to have to learn how to filter out "anti-abortion" and "pro-life" from my GoogleAds. Crap. UPDATE: It gets worse. Check out what I found at the other side of... [More...]

Found inApril 17, 2005 07:32 PM

Say it loud, say it proud!