A world with no abortions, ever

My beloved has a troll.  She’s a pretty much standard-issue anti-choicer, equal parts “Punish the Slutty Sluts with Forced Childbirth” and “Sex for Me but Not for Thee”.  Among the more choice turds she’s vomited up are:

Everyone would be Pro-Life if they pulled their heads out of their behinds and decided to take real responsibility for their actions. There’s no excuse to be Pro-Death anymore except for rape. And even now there’s a rape condom to help prevent that, too.

I haven’t asked her, is every woman who gets pregnant from being raped, who had not inserted the anti-rape device before entering the presences of a rapist,  culpable.  Or whether she personally wears one at all times.

 Sex makes babies. Plain and simple.  Perhaps the poor of the world, or the people not wanting to accidentally get pregnant should ABSTAIN from sex all together; get some better, cheaper, morally sound hobbies.

Yeah.  She really said that.

Once I finished bleaching my brain, it got me thinking.  What would be necessary for there to never, ever, ever be a need to abort. Read more

Thwarted

Things I did not do yesterday evening:

  1. Dishes/clean kitchen
  2. Fold and put away laundry
  3. Practice for choir
  4. Practice individual repertoire
  5. Clean the fishtank
  6. Trim Evil Kitteh’s nails
  7. Blog

It was still a pretty good evening, all things considered.  I had  dinner with a good friend, and then hung out with my brother, who played with Vishnu and fed him treats.  I’m hoping eventually he’ll get the idea that guests are a Good Thing and not hide for half an hour first, and I think last night helped.  But not only did I fall short in my lofty goals of accomplishing something, my attempt to torment my Asshat Neighbors was thwarted.

Some background first:  I do not like my Asshat Neighbors.  The mildest of their transgressions is smoking really rank, nasty weed under my open bedroom window in summer.  Read more

Procrastination

cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

There are three things I really need to do tonight:

  1. Dishes/clean kitchen
  2. Fold and put away laundry
  3. Practice new music for choir

Things I am likely to do tonight:

  1. Clean the fishtank
  2. Attempt to trim Evil Kitteh’s nails
  3. Work on individual vocal repertoire
  4. Blog
  5. Anything but dishes, laundry, or choir music

Trouser Roles in Opera: Feminist Observations

Woman in Mens' Costume

Catriona Barr in the role of Cherubino, from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro

Fabulous mezzo-soprano Kimberly Barber was in town the other day to do a recital and masterclass.  I couldn’t make it to the recital (I’d have to miss choir practice), so I went to the masterclass.  I went hoping to take away some tidbits of vocal technique, but the participants were all excellent singers already so that wasn’t the focus at all.  (Although she did make the singers do some of the same exercises my choir directors make us do, and for the same stated reasons.) 

Instead, the class was mainly about conveying personality and emotion while singing.  This year, the U of A opera students are performing Handel’s Serce, which is an excellent choice in a program where women significantly outnumber men.   While the dramatis personae are only slightly biased in favour of men, a good proportion of them are “trouser” roles: once upon a time they might have been sung by castrati, but these days they’re sung by women.  As an experienced performer, Barber has sung plenty of the mezzo-soprano’s trifecta of “witches, bitches, and britches“, but britches were very new to the students.  A good proportion of each student’s segment, as well as the question period after, was dedicated to “how do you portray masculinity”. 

It was a radfem reality check moment for me: these highly-educated, artistically and emotionally sensitive women lacked the language and underlying concepts to communicate about what they were doing, and were pretty much re-inventing the wheel. Read more

Winston and me, siblings in song-fail

I’ve been having ongoing troubles getting my voice working. Before the round of antibiotics I sounded like this guy:

I’m quite a bit better now, but the fail still sneaks in from time to time.  Read more

Never Startle a Pooping Cat

Already learned that the hard way with Lilith.  Repeated the experiment with Vishnu* the Schmoo Bear.  Schmoo was using the upstairs litterbox.  I was firing up the computer.  Apparently the Windows Startup Noise is the scariest! thing! evar!**  Little dude goes bolting out of the litterbox.  There’s a twist to this incident:  apparently Schmoo eats a fair amount of my hair.  Read more

Reproductive Coercion

As Melissa says, we have the cultural narrative of the woman who gets pregnant to “trap” a man, but this pretty much turns it on its head:  men use pregnancy to trap women.

Teens susceptible to reproductive coercion – Newsweek article

From the Newsweek article:

This month, Miller published a study in the journal Contraception detailing “reproductive coercion,” when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. According to Miller’s research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence. Read more

What I drove past on Blog for Choice Day

Underreporting of Sexual Assaults on College Campuses

http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault/

Men target college women for rape, to the extent that by the time a woman graduates, she has a one in five chance of having been the victim of a completed or attempted sexual assault.  Colleges’ policies and procedures for dealing with allegations of sexual assault appear to be the main culprit in an apparent 95% underreporting rate.

Sexual Objectification: Sauce for the Goose is NOT Sauce for the Gander

http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/sexual-objectification-and-silencing-empirical-evidence/

An experiment showing that women who were led to believe they were being treated in a sexually objectifying manner by a man were negatively affected, while men who had been led to believe they were being subjected to the same behaviour from a woman, were unaffected.  (editorial comment: a really neat experimental design too, if you like that kind of thing.)

The bottom line:  ”Women like to look at men’s bodies too” doesn’t seem to be an argument that holds much water when it comes to leering/ogling.