Men Have Sex too, Redux

I’m making people mad again. I really hadn’t planned to publish another column on the great 2012 birth control debate, having just published one for Time.com here. But the Republican party is the gift that just keeps on giving this election cycle, journalistically speaking, so I grabbed the chance to ask why the GOP politico-pundit class apparently believes in parthenogenesis.

For the record, I wasn’t suggesting that American men are all hypocritical scoundrels and d-bags, to use the current vernacular. (Recall: I live on a college campus.) I’m not saying that every man is running for the hills to avoid sexual responsibility. But some men — credible and reasoned men, as well as unhinged ones – are pissed off by my “polemical” and “unnuanced” argument. (Apparently I failed to note that lots of nice men don’t want to drag women from caves by their hair, and some women evidently do like their men to practice hair-dragging. )

Um, sorry, boys. (You don’t mind if I call you ‘boys,’ do you?) I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.  But on second thought, I think it’s kind of babyish to peevishly note what great guys you are at every opportunity, especially when it turns out there actually are tons of American men running for the hills. I don’t see why I can’t write an assertive and reasoned — and I’ll just put myself out there and say it: fact-based — opinion on the ways in which women are screwed by our contemporary political climate without adding all kinds of warning messages and footnotes and sidebars. Attention: No good men harmed in the construction of this essay. I’m hereby instituting an official disclaimer every time gender inequality comes up:

Disclaimer (insert in all current and future opinions): Yes, you are one of the MANY (!) millions of wonderful, caring men who respect womankind and fight for our rights. I am married to one. I am the daughter of one (an obstetrician, thank you). I am the mother of two. I am the friend and colleague and sister and sister-in-law of a bunch. I was only speaking about certain men. It’s hard to know how many. But probably only a  small handful who appear to wield disproportionate power, right? 

Feel better? Did you like the validation? Next time how about remembering that you guys have been, ahem, on top, for hundreds of thousands of years. (And, whoa! Quelle histoire that is.) Do you think maybe your manly egos are strong enough to handle the occasional pathetic rattling of chains — just for old time’s sake? You guys remind me a little of India –  the largest democracy in the world and a nuclear power – lodging a recent official protest via their Embassy against a Jay Leno skit. Seriously?

It’s not like people are actually listening to us hags, anyway. Even at this epicenter of feminazi-indoctrination-and-moral-rot where I work, you’ll see plenty of girls, as I did yesterday, who think it’s totally hilarious to dress up in public as Playboy bunnies for the annual Housing Day celebration on Harvard’s campus.

Haven’t had your fill? Take a look at the full essay, below. I’ll be out burning male effigies with my Wiccan coven.

This post was originally published at Time.com

It’s been another busy week for the male guardians of women’s bodies. We had the multimarried Rush Limbaugh attacking Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who had testified to House Democrats on behalf of women in need of contraceptive coverage. While she did not speak at the actual congressional hearing about the health-insurance debate, Limbaugh still took time to call her a “slut” and a “prostitute” and later suggested that women who avail themselves of government-specified birth control should be required to videotape themselves in flagrante delicto for all those hardworking (presumably male) taxpayers to enjoy.

After a month of increasingly intrusive attacks on the female body from Republican presidential candidates — and most recently from the state legislatures of Virginia and Texas — it’s clear we’re dealing with something more dangerous than mere policy debates. This is open contempt for women’s lives. When Limbaugh questioned where we “draw the line” with taxpayer money by comparing women’s health to buying sneakers, it struck a nerve in a lot of women who saw what their mothers and grandmothers knew all too well: society’s striking indifference to the risks and burdens women face from pregnancy…

Read the rest here at Time.com