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Grandma

Super Bowl domestic violence ad

Laura Ingraham mad at anti-sexist ad

No, let’s not sweep it under the rug

President Obama says vaccinate your kids

Chris Christie plays footsie with anti-vaxxers

Rand Paul makes a play for the anti-vaccination crowd

Just wow

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Rebecca Traister will dig into how much of a disaster our maternity leave policies are in this country. The Super Bowl airs some anti-sexist ads and some people get really mad and is anti-vaccination going to be the next anti-abortion movement?

Lily Tomlin is in a movie called Grandma that shows a woman helping her granddaughter get an abortion. The movie seems awesome. Here’s a clip of the grandmother trying to get half the abortion money out of the jerk that impregnated her granddaughter.

• Tomlin *

Watch the interview with Aisha Harris in show links, because both Tomlin and the director have interesting things to say about how abortion should be in movies, as it’s such a common part of life.

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Five years ago, there was kind of an amazing online revolt against the disgustingly sexist ads that ran during the Super Bowl, which may have been one of the first real examples of how social media can change a conversation overnight. The sexism in the ads during the Super Bowl has been declining every year since then, showing that it did have a major impact. This year, things changed even more as the NFL has a P.R. crisis, caused by Ray Rice and the cover-up of his domestic violence. So giving the appearance of fighting sexism became a priority and there were two ads run during the Super Bowl that did just that. One was an ad about domestic violence, based around a 9-1-1 call, a real one, from a woman who pretended to be calling for pizza so she could summon help without alerting her abuser.

• Super Bowl 1 *

And Always, the maxi pad company, had a pro-feminist ad called “Like A Girl” to reclaim the phrase “throw like a girl” as an empowering one. They show a bunch of people, adult men and women and young boys, acting out what “throwing” and “fighting like a girl” looks like, and they all do this little act of being fey, clumsy, and inept. Then they ask young girls, and they run and fight like, well, normal, because they haven’t yet absorbed the idea that women are inferior.

• Super Bowl 2 *

Neither of these ads should have been really remarkable, because in theory, we all agree that girls shouldn’t hate themselves and men shouldn’t beat women. Right? Right?! And yet, you will not be surprised to find out that a lot of people threw an absolute fit over this, because despite the official agreement that sexism is bad, the reason sexism persists is, well, a lot of people really do think women should be treated like inferiors. The Always ad caused a bunch of babies to whine that there should be a “like a boy” hashtag on Twitter, because, let’s be real, they think women should be shunted to the background and everything should be about boys and men. Laura Ingraham had a fit over the whole thing, and basically proved the argument.

• Super Bowl 3 *

Yes, I would say lack of empathy is Ingraham’s problem. But of course, her flailing proves the point: She agrees that “like a girl” means inferior and thinks that the way around that is not to fight back against the misogyny of that but simply declare she’s an exception to the rule and basically an honorary man. It’s sad that these little girls have more maturity than her in this regard. But then she continues to make the ad’s point for them by wailing about how the only people who really deserve care and attention are boys and men.

• Super Bowl 4 *

Yes, she literally argued that boys need a boost to stay ahead of girls, that they are entitled to have more sports programs and investment. As for the grades thing, it’s telling that boys can get lower grades and do less well in school and still end up getting better, higher-paying jobs when they graduate. That’s because being male means you get a leg up, and Ingraham is openly angry that the boost isn’t even bigger.

But the ugly reactions to the domestic violence ad may have been even worse, because Jesus Christ, can’t we at least just agree that wife-beating is a terrible thing that needs to end? Apparently not, as there were many voices calling for sweeping this problem under the rug, such as ESPN’s Herm Edwards.

• Super Bowl 5 *

I realize he may have meant well, but refusing to talk about domestic violence in football until after the football season is over is functionally refusing to talk about it at all. No one is paying attention to football news is the off-season. Honestly, I think feminists have tried the whole thing of politely waiting until it was somehow less unpleasant to bring these subjects up and what we’ve found is no one ever wants to talk about sexism. There’s always a reason not to talk about it. So yes, I think it’s good to bring it up during the Super Bowl. Hell, at least there’s an audience listening.

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Interview

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Anti-vaccination sentiment has been a growing problem in our country, as largely privileged, wealthy families continue to opt out of vaccination for their children, usually citing vague concerns that have been repeatedly and aggressively discredited by science. I suspect it’s largely because it’s not really about serious concerns that vaccines are dangerous so much as opting out has become a status symbol, a way for wealthy parents to distinguish themselves from the vaccinating masses. It’s also helped usher in the return of diseases that had been all but eradicated from the United States. The issue has gained particular prominence in the last month when a number of people were exposed at Disneyland, causing the disease to spread relatively rapidly, with over 100 people infected. Doctors believe that refusal to vaccinate is a major factor in this incident, and so President Obama went on TV to ask people to cut it out and just vaccinate their kids already.

• vaccine 1 *

Anti-vaccination sentiment is kind of an interesting beast in the U.S. It’s so clearly a reactionary movement, both in that it’s an attempt by elite people to create difference between themselves and everyone else and because of the weird obsession with “purity” that drives it. But at the same time, it’s actually understood vaguely in the public imagination as a “liberal” thing, because it tends to be concentrated in wealthy urban enclaves that usually vote for Democrats. There’s evidence that just because they live in liberal enclaves doesn’t mean that anti-vaxxers themselves are liberal, but by and large there’s been some separation between anti-vaxxers and other reactionary movements that view modern health care as “impure.” The most obvious ones being, of course, anti-choicers, who also rely heavily on arguments about how contraception and abortion are unnecessary and against nature and all other manner of nonsense. Because of this, it seems somewhat obvious that the “natural” home of anti-vaccination sentiment is not the left, but the right, and already the bridges have been built by right-wing hysteria over the HPV vaccination in particular, which conservatives frequently reject because they believe that there’s something wrong with acknowledging the fact that your daughter is unlikely to remain a lifelong virgin.

Well, conservative politicians, always ready with a knee-jerk nuh-uh response to anything that President Obama says, hurried along the process of anti-vaccination becoming wholly a conservative thing. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey kicked it off.

• vaccine 2 *

While he didn’t denounce vaccination or anything, he’s clearly playing footsie with anti-vaxxers, particularly by suggesting that we give equal weight to parents spouting nonsense and to scientists offering facts. And his nonsense about how the parent aspect matters more than the politician aspect? Uh, no. This is a matter of public health and having smart opinions on public health as a politician matters way more than what you do at home. But that’s part of the problem facing conservatives on this issue. Conservatives have always been wary of the idea of the public good, but with the rise of the religious right and Ayn Rand’s writings, being radically opposed to the idea of ever doing anything for the good of the community has become de riguer for many conservative politicians. Now, I hate to even bring this up, because it implies that vaccination is somehow a sacrifice for the public good, when it is not. It’s a pure win-win behavior: You lose nothing by getting it, you get protection against disease, and you contribute to herd immunity. There is literally no downside, so much so that anti-vaxxers have to make up downsides to scare people. But so hostile are some people to believing themselves members of a herd that they will actively come up with reasons to shirk any behavior that contributes to the common good, even if it comes at literally no cost to themselves. Which is what conservative politicians, particularly of a more libertarian bent, are facing. No surprise then that Rand Paul was even more aggressive on this front.

• vaccine 3 *

Paul is actually a doctor so his pandering to anti-vaxxers with these lies is particularly outrageous since he almost surely knows that what he just said is absolutely false. Sure, he never said directly that the vaccines caused it, so we can’t say he lied, technically, but he implied that vaccines cause mental damage, which means he’s either a liar or he was a very bad doctor who doesn’t understand basic evidence and medicine. I suspect it’s more the former, and Paul is basically making a play for the anti-vaccination crowd here. It makes sense, as a lot of them are clearly hostile to the idea that they should ever do anything for the herd, much less contribute to the herd’s immunity, and he correctly sees that misanthropic snobbery as a perfect fit for his libertarian-heavy Republicanism. The problem with all this, besides the lying and the pandering, is that by making anti-vaccination a political thing, you are encouraging more people to pick it up. If this continues, I worry we’re going to see people in red states, which currently have high vaccination rates, start rejecting vaccines to stick it to those nanny state liberals. We’re already seen how politicizing reproductive health care has served to destroy access. I worry what will happen if the same happens to vaccination.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, really ugly victim-blaming edition. I have no idea why Stacey Dash of Fox News thought that it wise to portray rape as what you have coming if you dare, no joke, leave your house.

• Dash *

She came up with some garbled it’s-just-a-joke apology later, but I think her meaning was super clear and not a joke at all. Both in that it’s “naughty” for women to behave in ways that are fine for men, which is to say by leaving your house and even gasp, consuming alcohol in the presence of the opposite sex. And in seeing rape as the natural penalty for said naughtiness, which is on the level of saying someone deserves to get a beating for watching an R-rated movie.