Tanya Erzen takes us into the world of “Twilight” fandom. Also, Senator David Vitter runs into serious woman problems, and “Friday Night Lights” show the world how to tell a realistic abortion story.

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Rape lemonade!

David Vitter’s 16 opponents

ABC investigates Brent Furer

Vitter doesn’t think abortion is a woman’s issue

David Vitter: huge women problems

Friday Night Lights: “I Can’t”

Oh boy, death panels

On this episode of Reality Cast, Tanya Erzen will talk about the phenomenon of Twilight super fans.  Also, David Vitter is running into serious woman problems, and Friday Night Lights shows how to put abortion on TV responsibly.

Sharron Angle was graciously given an opportunity by a reporter to back off her earlier comments about how rape victims who get pregnant shouldn’t get access to abortion, but should instead think of their rape as what God wanted for them.  Angle didn’t take it. 

• lemonade *

Hey, it’s a strategy she can use to agitate against all sorts of medical care.  Why stop at telling girls that it’s lemonade to have your own father’s baby?  Instead of treating people who would die without medical care, why not just tell them to make lemons out of lemonade and think of the solid they’re doing for the funeral industry?

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Senator David Vitter of Louisiana is up for re-election in 2010, but first he has to go through the August primary in which he’ll be facing 16 opponents.  Which is a lot for a Senate race against an incumbent.  Granted, all this is going down in Louisiana, which is known nationally for having goofy politics.  But even by their standards, things are getting out of control.  And it’s all because David Vitter is maybe not the best man at the job that conservative politicians are supposed to do of chipping away at women’s rights while pretending to be concerned about women’s well-being.  There are a lot of cracks in his armor.  And if he thought it was all over after he apologized for cheating on his wife with a prostitute that had her same name and kind of looked like her, well, unfortunately for him, it wasn’t.  Now there’s a new scandal in Vitter’s world.

• Vitter 1 *

To be clear, the incident that he pled guilty for was hardly some small incident that could be easy to rationalize away.  Not that you should ever rationalize away domestic violence, but I can see in some situations how people say, “Oh he just lost his temper and shoved her that one time.”   As those of us who study the issue understand, that first time with shoving is often just a precursor.  And things often escalate, and I fear that what Brent Furer did is the sort of thing that often happens after a lot of previous incidents that were more minor in scope.

• Vitter 2 *

I would like to believe that the real kicker to this story, which is that Furer was Vitter’s point man on women’s issues, is just a really unfortunate coincidence.  But I’m afraid that it may not be the case.  On the contrary, I suspect that staffing decisions like who is put on women’s issues are made by picking those who feel most strongly about the issue.  And Vitter is anti-choice and a so-called “family values” guy, which are positions I regularly argue are rooted in misogyny.  So I’m completely and totally unsurprised that a guy who beats up his girlfriend and gets a rise out of threatening to kill her would be the sort of person who makes it his job to push for legislation restricting reproductive rights.  And, apparently, he was the go-to person on domestic violence for Vitter’s office, something Vitter denied in the most hilariously sexist way possible.

• Vitter 3 *

The fact that he can say that abortion isn’t a women’s issue with a straight face is amazing people all over the place, but I’m not actually all that surprised.  When I joke on this show that conservatives see abortion as a sperm magic issue, I’m kidding on the square as Al Franken likes to say.  Which means that it’s both funny and absolutely true.  From the anti-feminist perspective, supporting male dominance over female bodies is a men’s issue.  Or more specifically, I see it as a sperm’s rights issue, because while all sperm are mindlessly focused on the task of furthering their specific set of genes, the men that create them may be totally pro-choice.  But to be clear, if you approach abortion from the anti-choice side, you’re in complete denial that it’s a woman’s issue, because you’re using a framework where women are passive receptacles, not rights-bearing people.  To them, abortion is about as much a woman’s issue as weeding is mainly the concern of the soil you’re pulling weeds from, instead of the gardener who owns the land.

But I posit that people who bring this ownership mentality to the table when looking at men’s relationship to women are probably not the best people for working on domestic violence issues, and this scandal has been an excellent demonstration of why.  But all this is an academic exercise in definitions, and the claim that Furer didn’t work on women’s issues is something that’s actually much easier to take head-on, as Chris Hayes did while sitting in for Rachel Maddow.

• Vitter 4 *

 Chris then goes on to ask if Furer would have been kept on Vitter’s staff if he’d stabbed a stranger just for the hell of it, and obviously the answer is no.  But I’d also like to point out that Vitter’s offices are simply reflecting a larger culture that doesn’t take domestic violence seriously.  After all, if Furer had pled guilty to kidnapping, threatening to murder, and assaulting a stranger like he did his girlfriend, he’d probably still be in jail.

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interview

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TV and responsible, realistic portrayals of abortion.  They really don’t go together. Abortion is mostly ignored on TV out of proportion to how often it happens. So basically, most TV approaches abortion in a way that’s opposite from reality, and that’s if they touch it at all. Almost no unplanned pregnancies on TV end in abortion, even though 40% do in real life.  And when there are abortions actually portrayed on TV, it’s usually in the most sensationalist, judging way possible, and it’s implied that women who do it face horrible consequences. 

But when the highly acclaimed if little watched TV show “Friday Night Lights” addressed the issue of abortion, they actually broke with the typical portrayals.  In a way, this isn’t surprising.  The show is consistently realistic and understated, except for the confusing second season that we’ll just ignore from here on out.  But it’s surprising that they had the courage to do a realistic portrayal of abortion. The story was that of a newish character named Becky, who is 16 and got pregnant the first time she had sex.  She’s pretty determined to get an abortion, which she expresses to the main character Tami Taylor.

• Friday 1 *

Becky goes ahead and has the abortion, and the show then goes and does a bunch of things that I couldn’t believe, because they were so realistic and intelligent.  I think it helps that the show was on Direct TV first, because if they’d initially done this on NBC, I don’t think they would have gotten away with it.  For instance, they showed, right there on TV, how incredibly stupid it is to have a doctor recite a script to someone who wants an abortion and then makes them wait another day for the abortion. 

• Friday 2 *

The mother is furious, and unfortunately blames the doctor for what he’s being forced by state law to do.  But she also notes that she has to take two days off of work because of this, not something that’s so great for a woman who works as a bartender and lives off tips.   But what I really liked was that it showed how these stupid scripts have no relationship to giving information, and aren’t even in the same universe as giving information. They’re intended to be shaming, and the characters take it as shaming.  In real life, I imagine it’s often close to the same.  In our sex negative culture, it takes a lot of internal work not to let these hostile messages about female sexuality get to you, and a teenage girl is often just not there yet. 

They also showed the opposition as being basically out of touch.  Which isn’t “biased” so much as just realistic.  The platitudes being offered by the mother of the boy who got Becky pregnant aren’t something the writers just made up, but a platitude anti-choicers actually spout. 

• Friday 3 *

Contrary to what some reviews implied, you can see there that they didn’t paint the anti-abortion parents as fire-breathing monsters.  They painted them as just sort of stuck in their religious platitudes and unable to see the big picture. And, of course, unable to think about the young woman’s own needs and desires. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. 

But I think the part that really was brave was when Becky had one more talk with Tami Taylor about her decision, when she’s trying to make sure she’s really sure. 

• Friday 4 *

The idea that abortion is a perfectly valid choice?  That you’re not going to hell, that you’re not a bad person if you choose it?  Tami Taylor is the moral center of this show, and so having her basically state that she doesn’t think abortion is wrong and she’d support her daughter through it is huge. 

It’s also realistic.  Tami has always been portrayed as a pragmatic person who bases her morality in empathy and love for her fellow humans.  Such a person is of course going to support the choice to abort, because they can’t help but see the moral necessity of valuing the human beings that are actually here over potential human beings.  Yes, that includes valuing women.  And girls.

Becky has her abortion, and it looks like next week there will be repercussions for Tami for being a sympathetic, generous person. Which is again so realistic, because that’s what right wingers do. They try to hold your reputation and job hostage to keep you from doing the right thing, which is valuing the lives of women and girls.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, that hoary old chestnut comes back edition.  Unsurprisingly, it’s on Fox News. 

• death panels *

It’s not a right wing idea, no.  It’s a right wing myth.  They made it up in order to scare people about health care reform. I think wingnuts have forgotten where this death panel crap even started. Peter Johnson is trying to pretend this nonsense started with rationing, which is something HMOs already do.  But actually, it started with right wingers trying to pretend that non-mandatory counseling of old people about their own personal end-of-life choices was somehow forcing them to die when they don’t want.  Perhaps next year they’ll claim “death panels” is actually a scary new technology or something.