I’m thisclose to pulling a Lysistrata
Day-umn. I went to bed in the year 2012 and woke up sometime in the 50s….the 1850s. What with Darrell Issa holding his ‘no girls allowed’ panel on contraception* and Frothy Mix’s backer, Foster Friess’s advice on birth control, and I don’t care that he claims it was just a joke – hey, Foster. You can have sex with the woman keeping her legs closed. I’m just sayin’ – it’s not been a good week for vaginae and uteri havers. Let’s not even talk about VA and state-sanctioned rape because then I’ll have to go out and rusty pitchfork™ someone, and I’m not in the mood to put on clothes and leave the house.
By the way, what’s going on in VA is unconstitutional and will be challenged**. In the meantime, countless women will have to endure having something forcibly shoved up their vaginae without their consent and for no reason at all except to slut-shame them/intimidate them into not having an abortion. That’s rape, regardless of if it’s sanctioned by law or not, and there is seriously something wrong with the people who thinks this is perfectly OK.
Anyway, all this anti-woman bullshit is pissing me the fuck off so much, I am contemplating pulling a Lysistrata. Oh, I can hear you protesting already. You’re saying, “Hold up, asiangrrlMN. Lysistrata organized the women of Greece to withhold sex with their husbands until they ended the Peloponnesian War. What the hell does that have to do with this bullshit the GOP is doing?”
First of all, let me compliment you on your knowledge of classical Greek plays! You have been excellently educated; I am duly impressed. Secondly, this is what I mean. There is a war going on, the GOP’s War on Women™, and it’s only getting worse by the day. They ran on jobs, jobs, jobs, and once they got elected, they started sticking their collective noses in women’s uteri. Maybe they think there are jobs up my hoo-ha? Well, they are sadly mistaken. I am very intimate with that part of my anatomy, and there are no jobs up in there. Trust me on this.
Republicans across the land have made it very clear that they don’t think women should be allowed to make decisions for ourselves when it comes to ::looks around to make sure no one is listening:: sex. I am not exactly sure why, but I’m sure it has something do with us being stupid, dirty, filthy, sex-crazed sluts whoring around and not being able to keep our legs shut. Or something.
At any rate, my thinking on pulling a Lysistrata is this: Imagine, if you will, millions of women turning to their men and saying, “No choice for me? NO SEX FOR YOU!” However, we wouldn’t say it that bluntly. No. Every night, we would get our men aroused to the point of almost painful and then whisper sweetly in their ears, “If I can’t have my birth control, you can’t have me.” Every. Gotdamn. Night. Get your man all hotted up to the point of explosion, and then walk out of the room. I guarantee that if we women stick together, this bullshit assault on our right to choose would cease in a flash. I give the men two weeks, tops. Except….
The huge gaping flaw in my plan to pull a Lysistrata
My Angry Black Readers are smart, so I’m sure you have seen the problem with this plan by now – any person I’d fuck is going to be pro-choice in the first place – therefore, pulling a Lysistrata would be pointless because many Republican women are just fine with the forced-birth bills spewing forth from their male compatriots. In fact, all the women I see/hear who are as pissed off as I am about this are of the same mindset as I am – no glove, no love and all that. Did I just date myself? Probably.
The other problem is that I love sex, so pulling a Lysistrata would punish me as well as anyone with whom I’d be fucking. If I have an opportunity to get my groove on, I’m going to be hard-pressed to say no – especially as I’m going through a bit of a dry spell. Incidentally, this is one reason I never understood the idea of withholding sex to get something or the other from your partner – that means I don’t get sex until my partner gives in on whatever. Do. Not. Like. I have very little patience with delayed gratification, especially of the carnal kind.
The only way I could possibly see working a plan that is similar to a Lysistrata is if I go around trying to seduce rightwing nutjobs and then denying them the second before any actual fucking occurs, but again, that seems like a punishment for me as well because I don’t find rightwing nutjobs to be remotely attractive. Seriously. Can you imagine trying to seduce this guy? Or this one? Or this one? Shudder. I used to be a performer in a former life, and even I couldn’t pretend to be hot to trot for any of those guys.
The not-so dramatic, very mundane solution
I hate the War on Women™ being waged by the GOP with every fiber of my soul. I am not a one-issue voter by far, but this is a hill upon which I am ready to die. And, as I wrote in my post about Virginia (yes, I’m quoting myself, deal):
This is why we fight. This is why voting matters. Both sides are not the fucking same. Anyone who thinks otherwise is no ally of mine.
Voting fucking matters. Virginia is in dire straits because the Senate essentially regained control, though it’s 20-20 Dems/Reps (tie-breaker is Republican). They did not run on any of this anti-women shit; a majority of Virginians are opposed to the personhood amendment; and they are able to cram their anti-woman agenda through partly because of a low Democratic turnout in 2010****.
This is the not-so-glamorous-truth as to how we win this particular war. We get our friends, our neighbors, and everyone we know to vote in Democrats in the next election. Until then, we shout until we are hoarse to ensure that everyone knows what dumbfuckery the Republicans are up to and explain in plain English how this will affect people on a personal level. We take the fight to the voting booths in November, and we fucking take back the House and the Senate on a local level as well as federally. I am repeating myself, and I will continue to do so for the rest of the election season.
We outnumber them. Voting fucking matters. We vote; we win.
*Seriously. A panel on contraception, and not a single damn woman on it? There is absolutely no excuse for that. None.
**My lawyer*** told me so.
***OK, my co-blogger, Roadkillrefugee who is a lawyer. Same difference, really.
****h/t to @ferallike on teh Twitter Machine, a VA woman, for boots-on-the-ground info.
When Tim Kaine ran for Governor here in Virginia in 2005, some of us were more than a wee bit nervous about voting for him once he was nominated as the Dem gubernatorial candidate. His known personal views as a very strong Catholic and former missionary, were that he was Pro-Life and against Same-Sex Marriage and Civil Unions. But he made it clear that he was going to abide by the wishes of the voters of Virginia and would not legislate based on his personal beliefs. He made it clear that he did not want to legislate against Same-Sex Unions as he was afraid it would potentially void all sorts of contractual relationships. He kept to his promises.
Based on those promises, he was endorsed by Virginia’s Planned Parenthood and the LGBT rights organization, Equality Virginia. On his first day in office, Kaine signed an executive order prohibiting job discrimination against state employees based on sexual orientation. He made it clear from the beginning that he would not support any restrictions on Same-Sex marriage.
In 2006, two years after
Karl RoveGeorge Bush started his campaign against Same-Sex Marriage, the backward redneck Virginia GOP legislators forced a Constitutional Amendment banning Same Sex Marriage onto the ballot. It passed resoundingly with the required 2/3 super majority in 2 consecutive sessions of the legislature & majority voter approval from the redneck parts of the state .McDonnell ran in 2009, as a moderate Republican which none of us in the blue areas of Virginia, believed after seeing his 1989 Grad Thesis blaming women who worked and the legalization of abortion for the degradation of the American family. http://www.scribd.com/doc/19247833/Regent-University-Thesis-Of-Bob-McDonnell ( If you skim this, you’ll understand why I was jumping up & down begging Democrats over the phone & in person to get out and vote against this SOB.) Our Dem candidate, Creigh Deeds went negative. Voters were over negative campaigns after the war Hillary Clinton started with Obama in the Democratic primaries and Deeds lost by a large margin because McDonnell easily convinced voters he was a moderate and because of a ridiculously low voter turnout of Dems in the reliably blue areas of the state. McDonnell overturned the prohibition of discrimination for employees based on sexual orientation by an Executive Order on his first day. (He later reversed this when Lockheed-Martin questioned uprooting their Headquarters from California to Virginia because of this discrimination policy.)
Now with a GOP super majority in the state legislature, McDonnell and the GOP led state delegates are clearly violating the will of the voters regarding women’s reproductive rights. And we’re seeing this same behavior of violating the will of the voters all over the country in states with GOP Governors and majority GOP led state legislatures: Walker and Kasich with collective bargaining, Snyder with the Emergency managers stealing public property, selling it off to their cronies & privatizing Michigan, Mitch Daniels forcing Right to Work laws down the throat of Indiana, etc.
If we count on average voters knowing about this “trend” by the GOP, we’ve made a huge mistake. We’ve got to arm ourselves with documentation and talk to people in our own states, to make them aware of what the GOP and ALEC is doing to our country. People in Arkansas need to know what McDonnell did here in Virginia. People in Pennsylvania need to know what Walker and Kasich have done to Wisconsin and Ohio. People need to understand why the voter ID laws being pushed in GOP majority legislatures across the country are being instituted. The media has done little to educate people. We need to be armed with book marked legit sources to show people the complicated schemes the GOP uses to defraud the voters into believing them. Everywhere the average voters need to understand the path of seductive innocence these GOP frauds have used to slither into these positions where they are overturning laws that represent the will of the majority. We need to show people how President Obama has fought an obstructive GOP Congress to get the successes he’s had because few even realize what monumental accomplishments he’s passed since the media has obfuscated them.
And we all need rusty pitchforks to scare the GOP extremists back into the holes from which they slithered!
Right on, ferallike. I’m so feeling your comment. We have to make sure everyone around us knows what is at stake. And, we have to put it in a way that it matters to them – not to us. Most people, even Republicans, are against the more draconian measures being passed around the country – they just aren’t well-inform at to what is actually being made into law.
That’s where we come in, and that’s our job this election season.
I have been ranting and raving and posting and reposting and signing petitions and everything else I can think of short of throttling the GOP SOB’s with their War On Women. I am definitely at the ARGLE BLARGLE WTF STFU I’m-so-angry-I-have-spittle-flying-out-of-my-mouth stage over this CRAP!
I decided years ago, at the age of 32, not to have any more children (I have one). I’ve never regretted it for a second. But just because I cannot have any more children doesn’t mean I’ve left the sisterhood. I don’t care if I live to be 90, this kind of crap is NOT OKAY. It is NOT OKAY to force a woman to be vaginally penetrated (be it by a penis or a vaginal probe or anything else) against her will. It is NOT OKAY to deny women access to contraceptives (sorry guys, but I would trust myself with that over trusting you). It is NOT OKAY, in any way, shape or form, for MEN to decide what is okay for women. If we are partnered/married to a man, yeah, let’s talk about what we want to do, me and my partner. But for some man/men who we don’t even know to decide what WE do with OUR bodies is the epitome of NOT OKAY!
My daughter is pregnant; in July I will be a grandmother, and I am so happy about it I am still floating on air. I cannot wait! I will celebrate my grandchild, and my daughter’s motherhood. I also celebrate the fact that she (and my son-in-law) were able to choose when to start trying to get pregnant. ALL women should have that choice — the choice of when, and if, to get pregnant. Men in the halls of Congress or in the cathedrals, parishes, synagogues, etc., should NOT get to butt their noses into that decision. Not unless it is their spouse they are talking about. With all other women, they need to butt-the-fuck-out.
Unless and until these misogynistic cretins back away from this, I will continue to ARGLE BLARGLE about it. This hits me where I live — and I know it hits many other women that way too. And the cretins can kiss my lily white ass if they think I will do any different.
Rage on, vocqueen. I never wanted kids, and I still don’t. I’m old and grumpy, and my best birthin’ days are behind me. None of this matters a whit as I am still a part of the sisterhood (and I am not premenstrual yet – gotta get my tubes tied soon). I want my niece to have all the choices available that I’ve had, if not more.
This is an outrage to women all over the country and an affront to the awesome men who support us/are our allies.
Congrats on your impending grandmother-hood!
I had a complete hysterectomy last summer and I’m ready to ask for a mulligan just so I can use birth control and piss these assholes off.
Frankly, I’m beyond Lysistrata and am ready to advocate for castration of all GOP anti-choice legislators and their supporters. If they’re lucky, it will only be of the chemical variety. But the rusty pitchfork is sounding better and better as a preemptive strike option!
If y’all wouldn’t mind a suggestion from an old white male foreign agitator….
Writing letters to elected reps is a tried and true method that’s stale as hell and hard to get people to do. Even harder to get the media to publicize….(so mundane a method that I’m betting some of you have stopped reading already)
HOWEVER….
If instead, thousands or (dream big!) millions of women took a moment to send a letter – with an aspirin scotch-taped to it – “For the pain I fear you will suffer on Election Day” – wouldn’t that make the chattering classes take notice?
Excellent rant and good suggestions. You know where I stand on this & I have been so pissed this week I thought my head was going in to orbit. I have a suggestion that no one seems to talk about.
Mandate vasectomies for the men. The procedure is easy peasy, no invasive surgery, none of those pesky hormones involved & usually solves the BC problem permanently.
This getting-up-in-arms of women that I am seeing in the last few days has me really excited. I am from a strong Republican majority state, and don’t understand AT ALL why women here just take the rhetoric. As Colbert points out in a recent great segment on the birth control panel, 98% of CATHOLIC women use birth control. If even the one religion that believes birth control is evil is at 98% noncompliance to that belief, why are we still talking about this? What we need for change is more women running for office. That, and the letter writing campaign somebody posted about would be awesome!