May 6, 2018
On Friday, we edged closer to the dystopian hellscape of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed the unconstitutional “fetal heartbeat” bill into law. The law requires doctors to give an ultrasound to every woman seeking an abortion. If a heartbeat is detected, which can occur in as little as six weeks, the doctor is prohibited from performing an abortion. (Source: “Iowa bans nearly all abortions as governor signs ‘fetal heartbeat’ bill,” by Brianne Pfannensteil and William Petroski, The Des Moines Register, 5/4/18). Clearly, Iowa Republicans passed this bill in the hopes that it will lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, (S.Ct., 1973) and deprive all American women of the right to choose.
Iowa is hardly alone, though, in its eagerness to rob women of our bodily autonomy. Seventeen states ban abortions after twenty weeks, heedless of the fact that fatal fetal abnormalities are behind virtually all abortions at that stage of pregnancy, (Source: “Abortion Bans at Twenty Weeks: A Dangerous Restriction for Women,” Fact Sheet, NARAL Pro-choice America, www.prochoiceamerica.org). “None of the laws have an adequate health exception and only one provides an exception in the case of rape or incest,”(ibid).
Any argument that these laws are grounded in a concern for life is belied by the cruelty of the laws themselves, which disregard the health of the mother or the fetus in their fierce determination to force women to give birth. It is also contradicted by a policy agenda that grievously harms the lives of actual children, from a refusal to enact common sense gun control, to efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to proposals to radically cut SNAP.
The impetus for these draconian laws is a hatred of women that seeks to punish us for exercising sexual agency. It may sound hyperbolic, but we need look no further than the discourse in the wake of the Toronto terrorist attack of Alek Minassian. Minassian was a self-described “incel,” an abbreviation for those who deem themselves “involuntarily celibate.” The incels are an online community of violent misogynists who blame women for their inability to have sex and want us violently punished (Source: “What is an incel? A Term Used by the Toronto Attack Suspect Explained,” by Niraj Choksi, The New York Times, 4/24/18).
Bizarrely, rather than roundly condemning the extremism of these terrorists in training, “respectable” men are seriously engaging with their “ideas,” as if the suggestion by a bunch of basement dwelling losers that women who don’t have sex with them should be killed is a policy proposal rather than the plot of every slasher movie.
Economist, Robin Hanson of George Mason University suggested that we explore the “redistribution of sex,” as if women were economic good in the chain of commerce, like electrical power or auto parts. Although Hanson dresses up his theories in the bland, abstract language of economic theory, the same misogyny is at the core. After all, Hanson once compared cuckoldry to “gentle, silent rape,” (Source: “Gentle Silent Rape,” by Robin Hanson, OvercomingBias.com, 11/10/10).
This horrific incel “philosophy” was further sanitized by Ross Douthat in the opinion pages of The New York Times. In a meandering column accepting that people have a “right” to sex, Douthat suggested that one way of addressing the plight of the incels was to “revive older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.” This is simply a more elegant way of stating the incel credo— that women’s only utility is as a vessel for childbearing or a release valve for men’s sexual frustration. It denies not only women’s autonomy, but our very humanity. Make no mistake, Hanson and Douthat are mainstreaming the radical misogyny of sociopathic misfits emboldened by the ascendance of women hating policies and politicians. As Elizabeth Moss said, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” isn’t fiction and it isn’t the future. It’s already here.
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