Friday, September 18, 2015

The Council Has Spoken! Our Watcher's Council Results

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The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

“I have a suspicion - and hear me out, 'cause this is a rough one - I have a suspicion that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to f**k her anymore.
The only person I can think of that has escaped the "crazy" moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.” - Tina Fey

"Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humour is vilified and their behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed of men as perpetrators of rape, murder and domestic violence. Boys must wonder whether they will ever be able to do anything right. This must make it painfully difficult for young men and women to build up relations based on honesty, love and trust" - Belina Brown


"Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they’re short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It’s defeatist and demoralising." - Christina Hoff Summers

“Beauty! Terrible Beauty!
A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!” - Homer


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This week's winning essay,Bookworm Room's Are these really “badass” defenses of women’s reproductive rights? is a fascinating deconstruction of some prevalent Femi8nist myths. Here's a slice:

Several ladies of the Leftist persuasion posted on their Facebook pages an article entitled “7 Badass Defenses Of Reproductive Rights To Explain Why A Woman Should Have The Right To Choose.” I looked at them and had my doubts about their badassery, so I thought I’d fisk the article just for a little Sunday afternoon fun.

As is often the case with fisking the Left, a short Leftist statement takes a lot of work to break down, because everything is flawed, from the facts through the underlying premise through the argument based on the erroneous facts and premise. The structure below is that I first quote the “badass” pro-abortion arguments and then counter with my own thoughts.

1. Male Lawmakers Sometimes Don’t Get It

"Who could forget Rep. Todd Akin’s cringeworthy “legitimate rape” comment back in 2012? Unfortunate as the statement was, it highlights a larger problem in the argument to restrict reproductive freedom: Men, who are often out-of-touch with the problems that women face, are more often in positions to make decisions than women. For instance, Tina Fey dropped this truth bomb in 2012 while speaking at the Center for Reproductive Rights Gala:

If I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m gonna lose my mind.

Fey’s point of view drives home the point that too many people who make decisions about reproductive rights are out of touch with the actual impact that their decisions have."

Some male law makers are morons. So are some female lawmakers. The reality, though, is that we don’t insist that all women shut up because some are stupid. In our Bizarro World of sexism, though, the stereotype of an out-of-touch male is applied to all men, who are told that they should remain immured in the wood shop and no longer bother their female overlords (overladies?).

Moreover, this line of argument, which I see frequently on Leftie Facebook pages, denies that men have any interest in fetuses, babies, or children. In fact, men have two very strong interests: First, if the fetus/baby/child is a man’s, that man has the same interest in it as the mother, and that is true even though she is the vessel in which it is nurtured for the first 40 weeks from conception forward. In a moral world, the fact that so many fathers walk away from their children is a disgrace — and, one must say, an inevitable byproduct of a socialist government policy that, through welfare, makes father’s economically unnecessary, at least for those who were raised in and consider normal a fairly marginal economic existence. Fathers who express an interest in their biological child from conception onward should be praised, not told to shut up.

Imagine if this argument had been around in mid-19th century America. Famed white, free abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, or Harriet Beecher Stowe would have been shouted down before they even began their arguments about the morality of slavery: “You’re not qualified to speak about slavery because you’re not a slave. So shut up.” Morals are not tied to race, sex, or creed; they exist irrespective of those petty human dividers.

Second, men have just as great an interest as women in a healthy culture. To the extent that the Left’s sacrament of abortion is focused on death, not life, all members of our society have a say in the matter. I’ve long contended that the Left’s fetishistic obsession with abortion is a death cult. The videos showing abortion centers engaged in organ harvesting hasn’t changed my mind. Indeed, the whole thing is eerily reminiscent of other cultures that engaged in organ harvesting, allegedly for the greater good.

Every moral citizen, male or female or fluid or whatever, has a say in preventing our society from going Aztec.

"
2. Reproductive Freedom Is About Trust

Mark Ruffalo has become a strong supporter of reproductive rights and a particularly vocal male advocate because of his mother’s traumatic experience with an illegal abortion years ago. At a rally in Mississippi in 2013, he reminded us that to take away a woman’s reproductive rights is to take away her ability to make decisions for herself.

I actually trust the women I know. I trust them with their choices, I trust them with their bodies, and I trust them with their children. I trust that they are decent enough and wise enough and worthy enough to carry the right of abortion and not be forced to criminally exercise that right at the risk of death or jail time.

If this doesn’t make you want to throw up a “preach” emoji, I don’t know what will."

I misread that last sentence. I thought its comment on the Ruffalo post was “If this doesn’t make you want to throw up get a ‘peach’ emoji….” I wasn’t sure what the “peach emoji” reference, but I was actually on board with the “I want to throw up” concept. Re-reading it, though, I realize that the “badass” post’s author was applauding Ruffalo.

Full disclosure here: I can’t stand Mark Ruffalo as an actor. There’s something about him I find creepy, so hearing him go on about trusting women with their choices sounds smarmy, not supportive.

Once again, this “trust” argument is predicated on the fallacy that all women are wise. They’re not. Who can forget the woman who had a “selective pregnancy reduction” (i.e., aborted the overage resulting from her IVF procedure) so she wouldn’t have to shop at Costco? That decision showed a whole lot more class snobbery than wisdom.

I know a woman who had eight abortions before she tried, unsuccessfully, to become pregnant. Apparently after abortion Number 8, her body, Mother Nature, or God decided that she couldn’t be trusted with a baby.

In any event, the whole trust argument pretends that there isn’t another life involved here. What Ruffalo is arguing is that he trusts all women to be impartial arbiters capable of intelligently exercising the role of judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the life they carry. Frankly, I don’t “trust” anyone to have that much responsibility, especially when there is self-interest at play.


Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Diana West with Strangers in Your Own Land submitted by The Right Planet.

It's a superb commentary on the so-called 'refugee' crisis.

Here are this week’s full results. Only Bookworm Room was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:

Council Winners


Non-Council Winners


See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

 It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

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