What’s America’s biggest problem?
Not catastrophic climate change; not income inequality; not systemic racism.
It’s women.
OK, also communists. They’re everywhere, but the Florida Legislature means to nip that in the bud. Schools will be forced to teach kindergarteners about the Evils of the Proletariat owning the Means of Production and how this makes Jesus cry.
But even the threat of a worker’s revolt pales in comparison to the Woman Problem.
To the increasingly hysterical Right, women — and their unruly bodies — are a danger to the Republic.
Christopher Rufo, the man behind the destruction of Florida’s once-renowned honors college, says women in higher education cause “all sorts of cultural problems,” turning universities into “social justice ghettos.”
Trust those girls to insist on learning about social justice. Whatever happened to getting that all-important MRS degree?
Back when New College was nationally ranked and celebrated for its creative approach to learning, enrolment was two-thirds women.
Rufo’s response to New College’s success? Admit lots of men instead. Shut down gender studies and lower academic requirements so a critical mass of jocks can get in.
More Kens, fewer Barbies.
A campus full of dudes will help run off those woke professor wimmin who agree with suffragist and writer Rebecca West, famous for saying, “People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
As if doormats and prostitutes aren’t useful!
To Rufo and his anti-intellectual fellow travelers, college was better when it was all about mandatory chapel and sports and frats and pretty girls in hard-to-get-off panty girdles.
Challenging corsetry might help address another burning issue: the scourge of “recreational sex.”
Sex with consequences
Rufo, whose attitude toward women would embarrass John Knox, claims the Pill causes “health problems for many women.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists begs to differ, but why let medical science get in the way of misinformation?
Undeterred by reality, Rufo declares “single-mother households,” which are to blame for “poverty, crime, and dysfunction,” stem from having sex for fun: “The point of sex is to create children — this is natural, normal, and good.”
Didn’t those single mothers have sex to create those children?
Was it OK if the sex was lousy?
Rufo is not the only idiot reactionary to hold these opinions. The Heritage Foundation says it wants to “restore the consequentiality to sex” by “cracking down on the senseless use of birth control pills.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas agrees. The concurring opinion he issued with the Dobbs decision suggests the court should “reconsider” same-sex relationships and contraception.
It’s not enough to take away the right to abortion, you need to make sure that if these jezebels have sex they can’t try to avoid getting pregnant.
You have one job, ladies: Pop out those Bundles of Joy!
Which brings us to Alabama, where they store kids in the freezer.
Clearly tired of losing out to Florida as Stupidest State in the Nation, Alabama says to Mississippi, “Hold my beer,” and declares that vitrified clumps of cells are, in fact, children.
“Extra-uterine” children.
Fro-’bryos
To the Alabama Supreme Court, frozen embryos are precious babies just waiting to glue themselves to the nearest uterine wall.
Here’s how we got here: Three couples who had conceived using IVF froze their extra embryos in case they wanted to give pregnancy another go without the expensive and painful hormone treatments and egg harvesting.
But a patient at the hospital housing their “cryo-preserved” eggs opened a liquid nitrogen tank full of fro-’bryos, pulled some out and dropped them on the floor.
As far as Alabama’s justices are concerned, that is “wrongful death.” Those fro-’bryos were people just like you and me, only much, much smaller. Also limbless, brainless, and shapeless.
The ruling means IVF clinics have stopped providing services. Companies that could send fro-’bryos out of state are afraid to touch them lest they fall foul of the law.
The court’s “reasoning” ain’t reasonable. Can the parents of extra-uterine youth claim child tax credit? Can those ice cube babies get a pre-born Social Security number?
And has anybody told the justices embryos are non-binary?
Alabama’s justices might want to read up on how humans develop. A born human has between 20 and 30 trillion cells (pending on physical maturity), while that twinkle-in-daddy’s-eye blastocyst can claim only around 200.
Yet they persist in saying that little smidge of matter should have the same rights as the walking brooders we call “women.”
Maybe more rights: Alabama, Florida, Texas and other neo-medieval states force women to incubate that blastocyst, even if it might kill them.
Pipe down!
The uber-Right keeps wishing chicks would just pipe down and accept their place in the Christian Nationalist order as good mothers and good wives, serving wenches at the masculinist feast, worker bees helping to make America 1850 again.
Some girls got the memo.
The book-banning, fit-pitching Moms for Liberty want to make sure America’s innocent babes never encounter icky realities such as our history of racism and genocide, or the complexities of human sexuality.
Those pearls they wear are for convenience of clutching.
Moms for America, a MAGA chorus line of Handmaidens associated with the pit of vipers that is CPAC, want to counter “radical feminists” and promote a nation dedicated to “faith, virtue, and patriotism.”
Their role model is the Victorian “Angel in the House,” a home-making machine focused on keeping the bread-winning husband happy and keeping the babies coming: After all, raising the next generation is a woman’s “most important work.”
Then there are the “Tradwives,” girly girls who buy “biblically-inspired cosmetics” and anti-woke tampons as they go about fulfilling God’s plan for their second-class status.
Blame it on Eve.
Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker probably does, judging by the amount of Old Testament scripture he quotes in his concurring opinion, skittering from Genesis to Jeremiah: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”
So much for separation of church and state.
It’s the 21st Century. We all thought women’s rights were a done deal. We assumed contraception and reproductive freedom were permanent tenets of our democracy.
We thought wrong.
A feature, not a bug
Misogyny is not a bug, it’s a feature of America’s blooming love affair with authoritarianism.
Dobbs is just the beginning.
Meanwhile back in ’Bama, the legislature is scrambling to pass a bill giving civil and criminal immunity to IVF doctors and clinics, lest their own constituents turn on them.
Turns out IVF is popular with the kind of upwardly mobile couples who might — except for this crap — support them politically.
It’s hard to tell if Alabama’s hastily scribbled new laws will clarify much of anything: Up in Washington, Mississippi Sen Cindy Hyde-Smith has blocked legislation that would provide national protection for IVF, calling it a “vast overreach.”
The damage has been done. The Alabama court has created a precedent: fro-‘bryos have been declared children.
No telling where this will lead: If they’re people, can they stay frozen? Will that be deemed cruel?
Will all the fertilized eggs a couple create have to be implanted so these extra-uterine citizens become intra-uterine and thus able to exercise their right to be born? Will there by a sudden rash of sextuplets?
Conservatives, both male and female, have always sought to control women — their bodies, their sexuality, their opportunities.
They’re afraid the old bumper sticker is true: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.