Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Funny times with Forced Birthers.

Jill Filipovic has a good piece up in Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan) entitled Abortion Clinic Protesters: “Sidewalk Counselors” or “Sidewalk Terrorists”? It covers the usual rabid theocrats and misogynist circus clowns, and it documents (as we already know) that these assholes are not driven by “baby killing” per se, they are really railing against women (and others) having non-church sanctioned, non-procreative sex. I have never understood this motivation personally because that is, quite obviously I would think, the best kind of sex to have. Nevertheless, this particular attitude, incomprehensible as it may be, explains why Forced Birthers are also dead set against birth control—which would, you know, actually reduce abortions.

Now maybe this is because I have a terrible fucking head cold, a hacking cough and a fever (OMG! EBOLA!) but for whatever reason I found the clinic protesters interviewed for this article hilarious. Don’t get me wrong—they are as rage-inducing as ever, and I still loathe each and every one of them with the burning fire of ten thousand suns. But this, my friends, is comic gold:

“[Women] had equality,” [demonstrator Fred] Delouis says about the 1950s, before Supreme Court cases legalized contraception and abortion. “But they had to be obedient to their husbands. That’s where equality comes: where the mother stayed home and raised the children in God’s light, and the husband worked, and everything was great. When I grew up, there were no problems.”

Equality, y’all! EVERYTHING was GREAT! And there were NO PROBLEMS…for Fred! LOL!

And Fred just keeps the hits right on coming:

“Society was great before they had abortions,” he says. “Because there wasn’t as much evil in the world.”

Did you know World War II happened after Roe v. Wade? HAHAHA!

“They weren’t murdering God’s babies, which is the most important thing.”

Silly Fred! Abortions are actually helping God murder his babies, because if there’s one thing we all know God loves, it’s murdering his babies! If 50% of pregnancies spontaneously abort, obviously clinics are just doing some of God’s baby murderin’ work for him! You would think Fred would show a little more enthusiasm and gratitude. He can be pretty funny, but I think he’s a little confused.

Then there’s the Death D00d:

Inside the clinic, Deb Fenton, regional director of Central and Western Massachusetts Planned Parenthood, peers out the window, looking for one of the regular protesters who shows up in an Angel of Death costume. “Is the Grim Reaper out there today?” she asks.

Excellent! I want to hang around Grim Reaper d00d while wearing my trademark bloody coat hanger dress—always a big hit at parties. I had been thinking of festooning it with bloody doll parts around the coat hanger anyway, and I feel this would nicely complement the whole “bloody dismembered fetus” theme they’ve got going on their posters and signage. I’ll fit right in! It’ll be a hoot!

Then there’s Ruth:

“I consider my profession having been a mother and a grandmother,” Ruth says, adding that her children agree with her values: two of her daughters got pregnant out of wedlock, one in high school, and both placed their children for adoption.

Oh, Ruth. Priceless!

And the lovely Nancy Clark:

“Abstinence,” Clark says. “It’s possible. I taught my daughters abstinence. It doesn’t mean I’ve been successful with my first two, but I have three more to go.”

Third time’s the charm? Bwahahahaha!

 

Clark says that after marriage, “natural family planning” is the only way to go. And she’s mystified by its lack of popularity:

“You can’t even get Catholics to use it,” she says. “It does work though. Of course, I have nine kids.”

Stop it Nancy! You’re killin’ me!

 

Clark testified in the Supreme Court’s recent clinic buffer zone case—presumably under penalty of perjury—that:

“close personal communication” in a “kind, gentle voice” was her preferred method of approaching women, and that “speaking in a raised voice, shouting or yelling is counterproductive.”

Once the shitheads on the high court struck down the clinic buffer zone law (a unanimous decision, by the way, issued from the safety and comfort of the court’s own 200 foot buffer zone), Clark now enjoys having more options of where she can approach women in a “kind, gentle voice.”

“Instead of yelling from here,” she says, gesturing across the street to the clinic, “I get to yell from over there.”

What a scream! (<—Hahaha. Sometimes I crack myself up.)

Next, meet Father Andrew Beauregard, a Franciscan monk—i.e. a celibate d00d (at least we hope…). He’s here to helpfully ‘splain everything you need to know about wimmenz lives:

“The fullness of being a woman is being a mother.”

And here I thought the fullness of being a woman was me eating too much of Frankie’s pizza. Huh. So I guess the fullness of being a man is being a daddy? Then why the fuck are you here yellin’ at pregnant people instead of making the babies? Dust that thing off and get to work, Father. God needs more babies to murder!

“For a woman to say that she has to have control over her body or over herself in such a way that she can’t be a mother really speaks to a degradation towards women.”

Conversely, compulsory childbirth is in no way degrading to women! I can’t stand it! This guy is a fucking pisser!

Protesters also told Filipovic they had a “save” the week before: that is, they convinced a man (*ahem*) to convince his girlfriend to leave the clinic:

Recounting their “save,” Meija and Pablo say the woman was going to terminate because her boyfriend had another girlfriend and had also fathered children with other women. But, they say, the boyfriend didn’t want the abortion from the beginning and after he promised he would support the baby, she came out of the clinic crying, and they walked away together.

Well that sure sounds like a win for everyone!

“We saw them together,” Pablo says. “That’s the most great thing — to see them together as a family.”

Remember, people, this is all about traditional family values: one d00d, his two girlfriends, plus a bunch of kids he’s had with other women. The MOST GREAT THING. Probably ever! Tee-hee-hee!

There is one thing I don’t get, though: if you’re so content with the choices you’ve made in your own life, what the hell are you doing spending your days harassing and yelling at other people for making choices of their own? I thought this would go without saying, but nine kids just isn’t for everybody. Hell, marriage isn’t for everyone, either. Just ask Father Beauregard about that!

It never occurred to me before, but I’m starting to think maybe they do it for the lulz.

[cross-posted at perry street palace]

 

Jadehawk Jadehawk's Blog, salon

Sticks and Stones and Jokes

The belief that words, especially if intended as humorous, cannot cause harm is counterfactual. And because it is counterfactual, it does harm in itself.

First, I’d like to point out that in many cases, even people who make this claim often don’t act as if they believed it: e.g. people who will defend the use of slurs because words are harmless will easily turn around and whine for ages about how being criticized is bullying. That’s not behavior consistent with “words don’t harm”, it’s behavior consistent with a belief that some words don’t cause harm, while others do.

Now, let’s look at the actual idea that words in general cannot cause harm. At the individual level, “verbal aggression, statements intended to humiliate or infantilize, insults, threats of abandonment or institutionalization” are all part of the medical definition of emotional abuse[1], and the CDC includes a number of verbal actions as constituting psychological abuse[2]. At the institutional level, the right to free speech is valued precisely because it is powerful; to believe this power only works for people’s benefit and never to their harm is to succumb to a Just World bias in which the Good Guys always win. In reality, any tool that can be used to threaten and discredit harmful institutions can also be used to prop them up, or else threaten and smear beneficial institutions (see: Fox News; all of it, on any topic. See also: Breitbart, O’Keefe, Rose)[3].

So, words can hurt. How about jokes?

First, use of disparagement humor can be a sign of underlying problems. People high in hostile sexism and men high in benevolent sexism tended to experience more amusement and less aversion in regard to sexist humor[4]. Furthermore, when people feel a valued social identity is being threatened, they will often resort to disparagement humor against a group that’s deemed an acceptable social target for harassment by their immediate social environment[5]. In other words, frequent appearance of disparagement humor in a community can be an indicator for community members holding prejudices against the disparaged group.

Beyond just being an indicator of prejudice, disparagement humor also creates new negative effects. A 2004 paper reviewing some of the literature on disparagement humor noted a number of effects, some in common with non-jokey disparagement, some specific to disparagement in the form of a joke. Reciting prejudiced comments (jokey or not) worsens one’s own attitude towards the group disparaged. Exposure to disparagement humor on the other hand doesn’t seem to affect the prejudices people hold; instead, it seems to affect how/whether people will act on their prejudices. The authors suggest that this happens because the degree to which individuals high in prejudice act on that prejudice depends largely on external cues of prejudice-tolerance, and the presence of disparagement humor creates the impression of such tolerance more easily than non-humorous disparagement or non-disparaging humor; but (of course) only if the joke teller doesn’t receive pushback[6]. Despite the above evidence, the trope that something cannot be harmful because it’s “just a joke” is widespread enough to even make it directly into the title of a paper which tests the “prejudiced norm theory” suggested in the 2004 review. It demonstrates that “[t]he acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability”[7]; thus, sexist men behave in a more sexist fashion than they would otherwise. In one experiment, that meant the sexists gave less money to a women’s organization; in another, it meant they actively took money away from such an organization[8].

Of course, disparagement humor doesn’t just affect the jokesters and bigots; it also affects the people who are being disparaged and/or who reject the bigotry in the joke. For example, disparaging comments, joking or otherwise, can trigger stereotype threat in certain situations[9]. There’s also evidence that exposure to sexist humor triggers negative emotional reactions (e.g. disgust, anger, hostility)in members of the targeted group[10]. In addition, finding oneself in the presence of bigoted humor can, in specific circumstances, actually lessen one’s critical stance towards that bigotry: if one believes oneself to be someone who speaks up against bigotry but then doesn’t act on that self-image, the discrepancy can cause cognitive dissonance. When the discrepancy can be explained by external factors (e.g. reasonable fear of harm to oneself), then the discomfort is the only end-result of experiencing cognitive dissonance. The same is true if there’s an opportunity to plaster over the discomfort by reaffirming a different part of one’s self-image. However, when external explanations are lacking (e.g. one believes there’s no actual harm, and all it takes is growing a thicker skin) and there are no opportunities for (self-)distraction, the cognitive dissonance is resolved instead by trivialization: since one is the sort of person who’d speak up against bigotry yet one didn’t, then the instance mustn’t have been all that bigoted; or maybe speaking up just isn’t that important to fighting bigotry, after all[11].

So what’s the overall picture? Disparagement humor is an indicator for existent prejudice, both in the jokester and the social environment where it appears; it strengthens the prejudice in the jokester; it creates permissiveness for other bigots to act more bigoted; and it may create apathy towards bigotry in previously critical, non-prejudiced audiences as well as discomfort and a hostile climate for the targets of the disparagement humor. And those are just the effects in the few papers I listed (I had to stop going through more literature, or else never finish this essay). Bigoted speech is, in other words, an indicator and partial cause for e.g. the toxic rape culture environments we find in fraternities across the country[12]. That’s not harmless. Bigoted speech hurts, even when it’s a joke.

– – –

[1] McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (2002). New York, NY, USA: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[2]National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (2008). Psychological/Emotional Abuse. [web].

[3]This point shamelessly borrowed from here.

[4]Woodzicka, J. A. & Ford, T.E. (2010). “A framework for thinking about the (not-so-funny) effects of sexist humor”, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, vol. 6(3), pp. 174-195. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[5]Pound, L. B. (2008). Jokes are No Laughing Matter: Disparagement Humor and Social Identity Theory. [Master’s thesis]. Retrieved from here.

[6]Ford, T.E. & Ferguson, M.A. (2004). “Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8(1), pp. 79-94. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[7]Western Carolina University (Nov 7, 2007). “Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says”. ScienceDaily. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[8]Ford, T.E., Boxer, C.F., Armstrong, J. & Edel, J.R. (2008). “More Than ‘Just a Joke’: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 34(2), pp. 159-170. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[9]Singletary, S.L., Ruggs, E.N., Hebl, M.R. & Davies, P.G. (2009). Info Sheet: Stereotype Threat: Causes, Effects, & Remedies. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[10]LaFrance, M. & Woodzicka, J. A. (1998).”No laughing matter: Women’s verbal and nonverbal reactions to sexist humor”, in Swim, J.K. & Stangor, C. (Editors). Prejudice: The target’s perspective, pp. 61-80. [book chapter]. San Diego, CA, USA: Academic Press. Retrieved from here.

[11]Rasinski, H.M., Geers, A.L. & Czopp, A.M. (2013).”‘I Guess What He Said Wasn’t That Bad’: Dissonance in Nonconfronting Targets of Prejudice”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 39(7), pp. 856-869. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[12]Chemaly, S. (Nov 4, 2014). “Still Think Rape Jokes Are Harmless Fun?” Role Reboot. [web]. Retrieved from here.