Mandy: “What if your mother had been pro-choice?”

Actually, my mother was an abortion provider.

Thanks for trying, though.

On those who spend so much time and energy on making the wrong argument:

… The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

… Until just a couple of years ago the abortion movement was a tiny handful of good people who were still having to concentrate just on getting the taboo lifted from public discussions of the topic. They dared not even think about any proposals for legal change beyond reform (in which abortion is grudgingly parceled out by hospital committee fiat to the few women who can prove they’ve been raped, or who are crazy, or are in danger of bearing a defective baby). They spent a lot of time debating with priests about When Life Begins, and Which Abortions Are Justified. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, social workers, clergymen, professors, writers, and a few were just plain women—usually not particularly feminist.

Part of the reason the reform movement was very small was that it appealed mostly to altruism and very little to people’s self-interest: the circumstances covered by reform are tragic but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.

… These people do deserve a lot of credit for their lonely and dogged insistence on raising the issue when everybody else wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. But because they invested so much energy earlier in working for reform (and got it in ten states), they have an important stake in believing that their position is the realistic one—that one must accept the small, so-called steps in the right direction that can be wrested from reluctant politicians, that it isn’t quite dignified to demonstrate or shout what you want, that raising the women’s rights issue will alienate politicians, and so on.

Because of course, it is the women’s movement whose demand for repeal—rather than reform—of the abortion laws has spurred the general acceleration in the abortion movement and its influence. Unfortunately, and ironically, the very rapidity of the change for which we are responsible is threatening to bring us to the point where we are offered something so close to what we want that our demands for radical change may never be achieved.

—Lucinda Cisler (1969), Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women, ¶¶ 2–10

… which pretty much accurately predicts the trajectory of the last 33 years, four years before Roe was written. If there’s one thing that the abortion rights movement needs in the face of recent events, it’s just feminism, and if there’s something else it needs, it’s a bit of creative extremism. The simple truth is that we are up against people (or specifically, men) who have no problem with commandeering real women’s bodies and lives for involuntary servitude in the name of their sad little theologico-political power trips, while too many of the sanctimonious pols (or specifically, men) supposedly on our side wring their hands and bite their lips and act like this is a position deserving anything other than contempt and resistance. I think the sooner we jeer the doughfaces into silence and live up to the part of abolitionists (since that is, in the end, just what we are), the better.

cicely:

And if the anecdotal evidence (I think it was Charles who provided) is true – that a very high percentage of women (up to 50%) don’t actually enjoy intercourse, intercourse could *still* be widely conceived, albeit privately, as violation.

This is a good point, but I don’t think that the conception of intercourse as violative is even private in the first place. It’s pretty explicitly proclaimed when people (mostly men) write or talk about intercourse as a form of possession (a man “had her,” “took her,” etc.) or force (a man “nailed her,” “screwed her,” “hit that,” “penetrated her,” “rammed her,” “pounded her,” “banged her,” “fucked her,” etc.) or accomplishment against resistance (a man “scored,” “got lucky,” etc.). That men use these terms with regularity and confidence, while also declaring intercourse is the gold standard for sex itself, the realest or perhaps only kind of “real” sex out there I think it’s no surprise that sex is widely conceived as permeated with violation and control (and that violation and control are seen as shot through with sexiness); also that many women would experience intercourse as unsatisfying, perhaps even violative, when so many men are approaching intercourse on these kinds of terms, and being very emphatic about the right and duty of Manly Men to do so.

myriad:

Lord no, you don’t seem divisive, it’s not at that lofy height. It’s just another example of a bunch of people fighting out their personal differences for all the world to see. My point is simple – you’re not in a private meeting room, you’re on the web for all to see. Does the setting fit the discussion?

Sure; why not? This is a movement, not a conspiracy; and as far as I know Barry is operating this blog as a forum for discussion, not as a recruiting tool for new feminists. This kind of concern for keeping heated disputes underground in the name of maintaining public appearances seems wildly out of place.

myriad:

You’re the converted. I pointed quite specifically to those who think about getting involved, are all new, and run screaming for the hills back into the safe arms of patriarchy where at least things are comfortably numb.

Young women undecided about feminism are not the infidel and we are not converts in possession of a dogmatic faith. Nor are they wilting violets whose special needs need to be catered to in order to bring them into the fold. They’re people like you and me and everyone else here, and if you have reasons (as you apparently do) for holding on to feminism in spite of what you see as destructive personal dynamics among some people involved in it, then you can expect that they may very well see those reasons too. Or if they don’t, then we need to think about making those reasons stronger and more apparent, rather than how we can suppress debates and disputes within feminist forums.

I don’t think that the argument here is unreasonable or destructive, but frankly, even if it were, it’s important to keep some perspective. If this is the harshest and most destructive in-fighting that folks have to deal with, then we’re pretty well off. Just to pick a couple of exmples off the top of my head, I haven’t seen anyone yet accuse someone else of being part of an menacing lesbian conspiracy to take over the women’s movement, or a CIA infiltrator trying to co-opt and disrupt radical feminism. Feminism wasn’t destroyed by much harsher and higher-stakes internal conflicts than this one, and I don’t think that this one is going to finish it off, either.

Gadfly: You gay people can all go home now; you aren’t special, and you don’t deserve special rights.

I’m sorry, but I must have missed what “special rights” I’m getting out of Brokeback Mountain being nominated for a pile of Oscars.

I keep checking my mail every day, but I haven’t gotten my “Brokeback Mountain” check yet…

Interesting post.

I don’t have much of anything to add by way of commentary, but there is another case that I’d like to mention: the “Nuremberg Files,” run by Neal Horsley, which collected names, home addresses, and personal information on abortion providers and those who (according to Horsley’s ill-defined criteria) were complicit in abortion. The modus operandi was basically the same as the SHAC website; the putative purpose was to collect dossiers for a future trial for crimes against humanity against abortion providers (after the Christian Reconstructionist revolution, or whatever). The information may have been used by James Charles Kopp to murder Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo and by other antiabortion terrorists in two or three other attacks. A lot of factors about the way the site was written and run led it to become an issue in Planned Parenthood vs. ACLA, with Planned Parenthood arguing that it amounted to an overt threat. The case has been kicked around back and forth in the court system; PP won the case before the full 9th circuit court of appeals but it may go before the Supreme Court yet. (Horsley, for his part, has been having trouble with finding Internet Service Providers to host his page; at the URI where the page used to be he now complains that it “has been shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and every Internet Service Provider in the USA,” and that “It is strictly against the policy of the United States of America to frighten the people tasked with eliminating unwanted Americans” (which I can’t say is very reassuring as to his intentions in having put the site up in the first place).

In any case, does Horsley’s site count as incitement? An actionable threat? I don’t know; I don’t think the answer is obvious either way. (I used to think it obviously did, but I’m not so sure anymore.) But it does seem likely that unless there are some important differences of detail, the answer will have to stand or fall along with the answer to the SHAC case.

That works if you think representative democracy and populism is particularly good. I don’t. There are numerous examples for why it’s not, such as Jim Crow laws in our own country, Apartheid, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and a sad, long list that goes on and on.

I have plenty of complaints against what I’ve described as “elective oligarchy” and what you describe as “representative democracy” here, but I don’t think that these are very good examples to cite. Just to take a couple of your examples, South African Apartheid and American Jim Crow, were sustained by systematic and near-universal disenfranchisement of the Black population (which in South Africa and in some parts of the South meant that the numerical majority of the population weren’t able to vote). They are no more examples of “representative democracy” than the “election” of the Holy Roman Emperor by the Prince-Electors or of the Pope by the College of Cardinals. And in fact both systems were promptly, permanently, and thoroughly destroyed by the simple expedient of enfranchising Black people to vote.

There are lots of crimes and lots of failures to lay at the doorstep of elective oligarchy, but this really isn’t one of them. The cases you mention are cases where representative elections, when they happened, destroyed or blocked the power of would-be tyrants, and in which it was only through the ruthless use of disenfranchisement, political repression, and overt terror that pseudo-representative power was consolidated.

Doss: Another of my troubles with the definition provided is the idea that Athenian Democrats would look at what we have now and call it tyranny, but in fact what they practiced was elective oligarchy- only rich men of the polis (not slaves, not women, not outsiders) could vote and the votes were binding on the rest of the population who had no say.

Sure, that’s a fair complaint. (Except that, terminologically speaking, what they had was pure, self-appointed oligarchy, not even elective oligarchy; the oligarchs voted amongst themselves, of course, but they weren’t elected by the subjects that they claimed the authority to rule over.) That said, I don’t think that the sorts of political institutions that the ruling men of Athens participated in depended on domination over an extensive slave class (either of socioeconomic status or of sex). The Athenian men disagreed (they tended to argue that liberty depended on the unearned leisure that they secured through violent extortion), but I simply think they were mistaken on that point; the institutions could and ought to have been opened to everyone in the name of liberty and human dignity. So, while I have no admiration for the Athenian “democrats,” I am willing to say some kind words for the democratic institutions that they advocated and built. The purpose of using it as a counterexample is simply to demonstrate that there is another way that popular sovereignty could be and has been practiced, besides just through elected legislatures or parliaments, and to illustrate the point that what democracy and democratic values have traditionally meant is supposed to be something much more direct than “rulers picked by the people.” The idea isn’t to provide an ideal case, but just to get people to think more about what kind of cases might be on offer.

Doss: I think it is somewhat unfair to him to judge him by today’s standards,

1. I don’t think of it as a matter of “today’s standards” as vs. “yesterday’s standards.” Slavery was as wrong in the 1770s as it is today; that’s a matter of human rights, not a matter of contemporary fashion.

2. As an empirical matter, it’s also wrong to suggest that slaveholding wasn’t known to be wrong at the time. Patrick Henry, for one, knew it; he said that it was wrong in his letters but never did anything about it when he had the direct and immediate power to do so. Moreover, I think that the idea that the beliefs popular amongst slavers constitute the only “standards” of the time is a mistaken one. Lots of people at the time weren’t so keen on slavery; chief among them, the slaves.

Doss: … and I don’t think hypocrisy per se is a major sin or vice (depends on the consequences).

No, but slavery is.

The reason I think that Henry was a scoundrel was that he held slaves. I mention hypocrisy only because it helps explain why I don’t think that his posturing in defense of liberty merits any admiration for him as a person (although the speech itself is worthy of remembering, and emulating).

bago:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” — Patrick Henry

“Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead” — Jim Bunning

Which of these two would YOU call a patriot?

Neither.

Bunning is obviously a snivelling tyrannical creep. But Patrick Henry, who personally held slaves, deserves no admiration for his hypocritical panegyrics on the liberty he steadfastly opposed for his black slaves, or the grotesque irony of condemning life lived at “the price of chains and slavery” when he daily inflicted actual chains and literal slavery on others. He was a hell of an orator and perhaps a useful agitator, but as a person he was nothing more than a hypocritical scoundrel, deserving of contempt. A speech like the one attributed to him is worth a lot as a speech, but if the question is how patriotic, virtuous, or admirable Patrick Henry was, on the basis of that speech, then in his mouth it is worth less than nothing.

Randall: What I’m calling democracy, the people as a group ruling the people as a group, and anarchy, each man ruling himself, are both possible interpretations of your broader definition of democracy. What I meant to say earlier was that while you’re looking on the bright side—calling true democracy what I call anarchy—what everybody else means when they say democracy is the other one.

Doss: I concur with Randall that a definition of democracy that necessarily overlaps with anarchy is too broad to be useful (i.e. it is not a connotation accepted by 95% of the people using the term).

I’ve been a bit unclear, so to clarify, I don’t think that “democracy” (“true” or otherwise) just means “each person ruling herself” or “anarchy.” What I think is that core democratic values (in particular popular sovereignty and political equality) strictly followed through, require a libertarian and, in the end, an anarchist society in order to flourish, because the only way you can end up with a polity of equals is ultimately through anarchy. I have no idea whether that end state is something appropriately called “true democracy” or “democracy” fully realized, or whether it’s something other than democracy.

What I’m arguing here is the more limited point that democratic values, as they are popularly understood, do entail a lot more robust protection of individual liberties and undermine the claims of elective oligarchies to govern “democratically.” You might object, “But look, democracy as almost everybody understands it just means elective oligarchy.” But I think that the problem here is that people are using the term confusedly: they use it in a way that appeals to certain values (like direct participation in political matters that affect you, sovereign individuals as the ultimate source of authority, political equality, etc.) while also applying it to institutions that (unbeknownst to them, because most people haven’t thought it through very carefully) betray those values.

If that’s true, there’s two different ways you could approach talk about “democracy” and “democratic” things. You could make it consistent by reducing the term to fit what it’s applied to: elective oligarchy under a mixed constitution. Or you could make it consistent by holding on to the more robust values, citing actual democratic historical precedents, and denying that the pretenders to democracy are what they are commonly claimed to be. If you do the former (which is what most libertarians do), then “democracy” is probably subject to most of the charges laid against it. If you do the latter, then whether or not it amounts to anarchism in the end, or amounts to something else, it’s susceptible to the charges commonly laid against it. Whether it’s susceptible to other charges is of course a further question.

As you mention, this may just boil down to an argument over whether to use the letters D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y one way or the other, and if so maybe it’s not very important as long as we just make sure we understand each other. But I’m not sure that’s quite all there is in the debate. A lot of people happen to attach a great deal of rhetorical weight to the idea of “democracy” and “democratic” decision-making, and I think they have both good (individualist) and bad (tribalist) reasons for doing so; I think that challenging them to think harder about the concept, and dialectically encouraging them to favor their better instincts over their worse, may be worthwhile.

It may also be strategically useful as part of an argumentative and political strategy towards getting what we ultimately want: but that’s because I specifically think that encouraging an attitude of insolence towards professional politicians, enacting specific limits on their official powers in favor of greater popular control, and generally fostering more suspicion towards elites and more trust in ordinary people, is likely to get us closer to liberty than following the contrary strategies and hoping to educate the elites. (Because, roughly, most of the dangers to liberty right now are posed by arrogant self-appointed elites, and systematically undermining their claims to special authority and dignity is one of the best ways to deal with them.) Now, that’s a substantive, partly empirical claim about the predicament we’re in and likely to be in for the next several years, and I realize that I haven’t given my argument for it. But I do hope that it clears up a bit where I’m coming from.