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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll cover a street art protest against sexual harassment, the return of the Republican rape philosophers, and ask the question: Is the movie Frozen oppressing men?

During the interview section of this podcast, I’ll dig more into the “Stop Telling Women to Smile” project, but as a teaser, here’s a clip from one of the videos posted at Fusion covering the art project.

• harassment *

Check the site out in show links!

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During the 2012 election, starting with Todd Akin’s comment about “legitimate rape,” there was a spate of Republican politicians making unfortunate comments about rape, eventually earning them, via the writer James Wolcott, the nickname “rape philosophizers.” Since then, there’s been some efforts on the right to get conservatives to realize when it comes to the subject of rape, discretion is the better part of valor. Or, that when it comes to women, better to stay silent and let people assume you have no empathy rather than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. But conservatives just can’t help themselves. And so here is the latest round-up of rape philosophers, to show that this problem is not going away.

West Virginia is considering a law that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, allowing all sorts of rape philosophizing to commence.

• rape 1 *

It appears that Brian Kurcaba’s opinion is that while the rape-based delivery system is distasteful, women should be swooning with gratitude at the rare and precious opportunity to get their hands on some actual sperm to make a baby with. As you can imagine, this comment caused some people who do not think rape victims should be subject to idiotic sentimentality about how “beautiful” it would be to force childbirth on them, and so Kurcaba offered an apology. Except it wasn’t much of an apology, saying, “I apologize to anyone who took my comments about the sanctity of human life to mean anything other than that all children are precious regardless of circumstances.” Which is that he continues to maintain that forcible impregnation is a beautiful gift, and is just sorry that you rape victims aren’t more grateful for this precious opportunity.

More rape philosophizing was on hand in Utah, as the legislature considered shoring up its rape laws to clarify that yes, it is rape to force sex on an unconscious person because, being unconscious, they can’t consent. You may be wondering how that wasn’t already the law, but state representative Brian Greene had other questions.

• rape 2 *

So let’s say you’re married to a lady and your wife decides to stop having sex with you. Sure, you could ask her what the problem is and perhaps seek marital counseling, but ew, I hear you get girl cooties if you actually do something like think about your wife’s feelings. So instead, wait until she’s asleep and then just take her unaware! That’s the solution, right? Until all these killjoys ruined it all by pointing out that just because you marry someone doesn’t mean she’s actually your property and no, you don’t just get to rape her when you feel like it because you can’t be bothered to have a conversation with your wife. Eventually, Greene realized his pity for the marital rapist routine was not winning him any fans and he switched positions on this, but it’s just mind-boggling that this continues to be a problem in 2015.

Not all the rape philosophers of late are men, however. Catherine Hanaway, who wants to be the governor of Missouri, recently gave a long speech where she basically blamed feminism and birth control for the sexual abuse of children.

• rape 3 *

I’m cutting away because she goes on a rant saying that women lose jobs and educational opportunities because of “sexual permissiveness”, an argument that would require you to believe that more women held jobs and got college degrees in the Victorian era than now, a self-evidently silly argument. But then she goes on to make this about child sex abuse, and things get really weird.

• rape 4 *

And she goes on at length, but you get the idea: She is arguing that abortion and quote-unquote “other things”, which clearly means contraception, leads to raping children. Because if you let women have sex for pleasure, then there’s no way you can ever have any rule governing sexual activity ever. Notice what is not mentioned in this rant? The idea of consent. Women are adults who can consent to sex, something you’d think people who are always on about freedom would understand. Children are not. This is an important difference, and a much clearer one than trying to rules-lawyer whether or not sex is okay depending on what medications you take or whether or not you’ve been married. But ultimately, that’s what all rape philosophizing really comes back to: Undermining the centrality of consent when discussing human sexuality. Rape philosophers want right and wrong to be about anything but consent. Which makes sense. We are talking about people who want to force you to give birth without your consent, so they have a strong reason to want to undermine the concept of consent in the public imagination.

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Interview

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Multiple times on this podcast, I’ve shared my theory that traditional conservatism has been absorbing and regurgitating more and more “men’s rights” ideas. The argument driving the “men’s rights” movement is this notion that our society isn’t actually sexist but, in fact, is somehow anti-male. Basically, it’s less a movement and more a long-form attempt to play “gotcha” with feminists by trying to invert every feminist argument against sexism and spinning it like men are the real victims of gender-based oppression. Now, it’s absolutely true that sexism negatively affects men in ways that need to be talked about, but one of the things that makes “men’s rights” discourse so pernicious is they have no real interest in talking about those realities, because then they would have to admit the solution is feminism, and, at their heart, they are about upholding a sexist status quo and fighting feminism. So, for instance, it’s true that women tend to have custody after divorce more than men. But the reason for this is that women, due to sexism, tend to be primary caregivers more than men and so most couples come to a mutual agreement after divorce to keep it that way. If you want to change this, what you need is more feminism, encouraging couples to split child-care duties more. But “men’s rights” guys don’t want that. They want to change the law so that men can get custody without having to be primary caregivers—so they can, in other words, have it both ways.

Anyway, another attempt by “men’s rights” morons to play “gotcha” with feminists is to claim that it’s men, not women, who are victims of gender stereotypes in Hollywood. It’s an argument based in the worst kind of bad faith, but that doesn’t stop it from being trotted out on Fox News, by host Steve Doocy and guest Penny Nance from Concerned Women for America.

• Frozen 1 *

This is an unsubtle game of “gotcha” with feminists. Feminists frequently point out how Hollywood stereotypes and marginalizes women. So they’re trying to suggest that nuh-uh, it’s actually men who are stereotyped and marginalized, an argument that they make by huffing and puffing about how some male characters are villains and some are funny and etc., etc. But feminists never actually said we object to any portrayal of a woman besides showing women as humorless heroes, as they clearly are arguing all men should be shown here. Quite the contrary, feminists argue that the problem is that women don’t get to play a variety of characters. The problem isn’t having female characters with flaws, it’s that female characters, when they exist, often don’t get to have personalities at all. The male characters in this movie are not anti-male stereotypes or flat characters, but pretty well-written with a lot of diversity in terms of personality. Which is what feminists want for female characters as well. Which they actually get in Frozen, but I’ll return to that in a second. Because what Penny Nance says next is such a blatant lie that it really is stunning.

• Frozen 2 *

Basically, they’re counting on the audience having not seen Frozen, which is a weird thing to count on, considering the movie made like a billion dollars. Because if you have seen it, you know that the male hero, Kristoff, is not treated as a superfluous bumbler who is only good for a paycheck. He’s a competent and funny and charming man who is loved by all and helps out a lot. Indeed, the notion that men are held out as nothing but paycheck generators is particularly weird because this movie is about a queen and a princess who are, you know, wealthy women. In fact, part of the plot is fending off men who are using them for their money. The lesson of the story is you should love a man for his own sake, not just because he’s some kind of symbol to you. So basically, the opposite of what they say they see on screen. But we all know the real objection to Frozen has nothing to do with actual concerns about men being, uh, oppressed and stereotyped. The real concern here is that Frozen allows women to be something other than superfluous set decoration. Doocy edges closely to saying the quiet part out loud.

• Frozen 3 *

So the concern is there are not enough movies with male heroes. Got it. Chris Hayes had an interesting response to that.

• Frozen 4 *

The only conclusion I can draw is that Penny Nance and Steve Doocy believe that 29 percent of speaking roles going to women is too many speaking roles. I wonder what would be the acceptable level of speaking roles for women? Ten percent? Five percent? Or should women never speak at all?

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-vaccination hysteria merges completely with anti-abortion hysteria edition. Fox News guest Jonathan Hoenig graced us by bringing these two anti-science, anti-rationality forces together in one meltdown rant.

• forced *

Of course, the actual, non-fantasy problem is not forced abortion, but forced childbirth, which is already going on in various states as safe abortion clinics are being shut down by conservative forces in an attempt to force women to give birth against their will. And unlike mandatory vaccination, which is both good for the public and good for individuals, forced childbirth is linked to poorer health outcomes for women and children and it escalates unnecessary costs on taxpayers. The only value to forced childbirth is that it satisfies the sadistic need of conservatives to see women punished for having sex.