anti-choice

Feminist book-lovers will already be long familiar with novels depicting the rollback of reproductive rights, such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Misconceiver, and Woman on The Edge of Time. So is there room for another book looking at a the consequences of criminalizing abortion? Yes, there is—perhaps more than ever.

I’m having a bad day. Last night, I had a nightmare about the Bella Swan birth scene from Breaking Dawn. (To summarize: I was Bella.) I’m suffering from BSO, birth scene overload. It all seems so hopeless. The woman is always suffering. She lacks control and agency; surrounded by men, she’s told what's best for her and then chastised for making supposedly irrational demands. I just can't watch. 

So I took a break from birth scenes to follow a lead (thanks @kristinrawls!) about last week’s episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead, a post-apocalyptic series about a group of survivors trying to avoid zombie bites. This proved to be terrible therapy for my BSO.

I have a confession to make. I was raised in an evangelical Christian home, and when I was much much younger... I was a fan of contemporary Christian music (CCM). Oh, yes. I reailzed just how much of an affront to music it is almost half of my life ago, but lately, I've been thinking about just how entrenched it is in the ideology of the Christian Right. Consider this awful 1995 track by Twila Paris called "Rescue the Prisoner." (The "prisoner," it turns out, is a member of the LGBTQ community who is said to be "demanding rights" and "defending wrong.")

A couple of commenters have raised questions about progressiveness in country music. Today, I want to suggest that there are progressive voices, at least in Americana, roots, and alt country music, but those voices are limited. They are almost always white, and usually populist and male. There are a few women in country who arguably identify as feminists. None of these artists are evangelical Christians like some major label country musicians, but faith imagery permeates much of their songwriting. It is often used in visions of a Utopian future, or it takes on a perverse meaning.

Today I list my top five feminerd annoyances, including the lack of LGBT characters on Star Trek, sexist comics at The Oatmeal, and "chainmail bikini"-type video game costumes for women.

 

Is your anti-abortion billboard targeting the African-American community just not cutting it? Here's one way to take things up a notch: presidential assassination!