ProWomanProLife

I’m not ignoring this story, doing the rounds, I promise, showing that there are no negative mental health effects after abortion. I just feel like with a topic as political as this one, I should read the study before I link to it and have some commentary on what they did or did not do.

I have not yet had the time to do so. But I will say this: This study flies in the face of a great number of other studies indicating precisely the opposite. And I will also add that all those other studies showing abortion does indeed harm a woman’s mental health did not get the press this one is getting.

My beef is with the media for quickly picking up on this story, while concealing other studies that show the opposite outcome. They think they are being “feminist” or woman-friendly by reporting this story, because they are “pro-choice” but in fact what they are doing has quite the opposite effect. Since so many women do indeed suffer after their abortions, this type of press tells them their suffering is unwarranted and that there is something wrong with them for feeling bad.

This is not to say that every woman feels bad after an abortion. Some don’t. But for every one woman who doesn’t, there’s a defensive woman who, quite frankly, hasn’t quite processed what she’s done, and then there are, of course, those who truly do feel bad and suffer suicide, suicide ideation, increased drug and alcohol use, etc.

I’m sure we could get to a point where no woman ever felt bad about her abortion. This is fully possible. But is it desirable? Would this not mean a distancing from our own selves? A truly clinical approach to something so intimate and personal is not the direction we want to go. I’m not asking for women to feel bad, no. I’m asking for them to be empowered enough that they wouldn’t make the decisions that leave them with lousy decisions in the first place.

All of these ideas on what it means to be a truly strong woman, one who is confident, bold, assertive and makes good decisions as a result is whispering into the wind when it comes to the media who are stuck on the notion that apparently there is an “undo” button for sex. Which there isn’t. Sex isn’t a recreational activity–therefore the outcomes of poor choices–babies or killing said babies–aren’t recreational either. A lack of poor mental health after killing your baby is possible, but wholly undesirable. When we truly reach that stage where studies return this outcome based on good research methodology, we’ll have a lot more than abortion to worry about.

The thought has crossed my mind that one might get slightly more sympathy for being a pedophile than for espousing virginity until marriage. Read this infantile editorial and decide for yourself. The blog they are referring to is here.

I haven’t read much of the blog yet, but I will say this: Those are four brave women, taking on an untouchable topic. They are overtly religious about it, from what I can tell. As if there weren’t enough purely secular reasons out there to abstain from sex. I’ll never forget my decidedly non-Christian, non-virgin of a family doc, years back, wryly commenting how she had had it with meaningless sexual encounters and had practiced a newfound virginity of sorts with her now husband. It shocked the pants off me (not literal) because she was quite a curt, down-to-earth, very professional, non-emotional, and again, I’m quite sure, non-religious woman.

The hostility to four women who are not “telling you how to live” but rather providing an example of how one might consider doing things differently without growing an additional head beggars belief in an era of pain over misplaced, misused, misappropriated sexuality.

What a joke. A” study” with a test group of 23 undergraduates and sex “educators,” whose average age is about 21. The conclusions? That casual sex has “rules,” people know them, and sexual experimentation creates a foundation for good long-term relationships. Right.

They might as well open the study with “There was, like, this one time, at band camp.”

I would insert a quote from the article, but it is generally, from beginning to end, one terribly sad quotable quote.

Why do I feel a sense of sweet vindication in reading this? I get called crazy for saying the same thing (albeit in a decidedly different way). Maybe Margaret Wente gets called crazy too. I’ll never know. But it’s nice to see these thoughts in print in the Globe:

 Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy sexual liberation as much as I’d hoped. Eventually, it occurred to me that it seemed to be working better for guys than it was for me. Men, I noticed, tended to agree that sex without meaning was pretty swell. Women tended to agree that sex without meaning was impossible. Although we approved of it in theory, we were all too susceptible to messy emotional entanglements. …

If men and women were equal in their sexual desires, we’d have a different conversation. But as that famous piece of doggerel goes, Hogamus higamus/ Men are polygamous;/ Higamus hogamus/ Women monogamous. The long history of civilization is in many ways a progressive effort to rein in the indiscriminate (and frequently destructive) sexual desires of men. This effort, no doubt, frustrates men, but it’s good for women and children, and also for society.

Besides, there’s something about monogamy that some long-married people have discovered (much to their surprise). It’s the same thing Dan Savage tells gay kids: It gets better.

To summarize: “Sexual liberation” liberates men and hurts women. That’s my view and I’m sticking to it. (I might add I also think it hurts men in a long term, societal sort of way, when men find themselves to be 40 and living wholly unfulfilling lives in the fast lane, or in the not-so-fast lane as the stats showing men living in mama’s basement will attest, but this is a short blog post and I won’t get into that here.)

The Real Housewives of the Bible. Coming soon on DVD.

I have only read the article I’m linking to here, but I think this could be interesting. Sometimes I feel hopeless that our culture is trapped in this 1970s time warp, teaching ridiculous notions on sex and relationships as if it was the wisdom of the ages. Goes without saying that part and parcel of this attitude is castigating religious values as misogynistic and backwards. But something tells me that a woman living in the Negev in exile was probably a whole heck of a lot stronger than any of us are today, whether or not we call ourselves “feminists.”

I can testify that there is something “different” about me during ovulation, and this is no individual quirk. Evolution has crafted women to desire intercourse more during this fertile period, and a new study suggests that women might even be able to detect which man is most likely to desire her as well.

They buy sexier clothing, are more likely to stare at attractive men and — if they are strippers — they get better tips.

And now science has identified yet another characteristic of the elusive ovulating woman: she is better at picking out straight men from the gays.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests that ovulation significantly improves a woman’s ability to judge a man’s sexual orientation.

[...]

A slew of strange ovulation phenomena have been uncovered in recent years as scientists track how the female cycle impacts mating practices. Other research has suggested that ovulating women emit a scent that is more attractive to men, get better tips as lap dancers andbuy sexier clothing in an unconscious attempt to outdo rivals.

[...]

“That suggests they’re not hyper attentive to everything, just men and sex essentially,” Rule says.

In terms of practical application of the findings, Rule says it may be useful for women to know that they appear to be better at picking partners — at least sexual partners — when they are ovulating.

FYI, if you’re on birth control, you can’t ovulate.

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Andrea adds: Splitting hairs, perhaps, and I know this wasn’t the point of this post, but if you are on birth control, you most likely don’t ovulate. (I believe the Pill first and foremost attempts to stop ovulation, but if that fails, it makes the womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg.)

This interview with Robert P. George is about marriage in response to New York legalizing same sex marriage. But it more than touches on sexuality and I find it aptly describes the culture we are currently living in. Here in Ottawa, a conservative talk radio station recently asked listeners to respond to the New York decision. When one listener called in to express a view in support of traditional marriage, the host steamrolled him with his own view in support of same sex marriage.

Now Robert P. George is no dummie and I don’t think he’s a homophobe, either. I do buy into his arguments; they make sense to me, though they didn’t always. But even as I read this piece, I realize I probably couldn’t convey the depth of what he is saying to the average person on the street. “Sexual liberation” no matter the fact that it was initially championed by the likes of Hugh Hefner, sounds like freedom to people, and freedom, we rightly think, is good. So explaining that “sexual liberation” is actually the opposite of freedom, that it binds and constrains and takes human beings further from their potential, is a tough sell.

What I’m saying here, in a convoluted way, is that I agree with Robert P. George. He’s smart and he knows what he is talking about. But I don’t think we’re going to win this particular battle over same sex marriage because we are poorly educated, it’s a sound bite culture, and arguments in favour of traditional marriage fit better into academic journals, rather than on the nightly news.

I came across this article, an interview with sociologist Mark Regnerus (who spoke at my workplace’s conference in early May) and thought, this is interesting. He discusses marrying young, building a life together, and the conundrum many Christians face when they are told both to wait to marry until they are “ready” and to wait til marriage to have sex–not a winning advice combo. In any event, I clicked over to Yahoo to send this article to a friend, where I got distracted by another relationship type column with the headline “Is this the recipe for a happy relationship?” Their advice? Drink cocktails together. No really. So there you have it: Two drastically different worldviews in close proximity.

This article is about how more and more kids clothes are made to be “sexy”–for as young as seven-year-olds. That’s a story in itself but I found this quote intriguing:

It’s important to realize that these clothes are ubiquitous and they are hard to avoid,” [said] Mackey. “But when young girls wear these clothes they send the message that they are sexually available. And the more they are exposed to clothes that suggest they should be attractive to the opposite sex, they could put themselves into risky situations.”

Seems to me this comes awfully close to saying that how we dress matters, because it sends certain signals. But that’s taboo, and I believe the genesis of the “Slutwalk” came about to protest a cop who implied that women should be careful about how they dress. Just wanted to highlight the discrepancy.

SlutWalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.

-Margaret Wente

Almost missed this column from Thursday, May 12, about the “Slutwalk” phenomenon. I had avoided commenting on that precisely because I view it as what you get when grad students in women’s studies run out of other things to do.