My procrastination at work strategy, reading the news, has me keeping up with the vanguard of leftist "thought." Al Jazeera leads the herd of fools last week. They simultaneously ran items on ending patriarchy, abortion and prostitution. The utopic vision of ending patriarchy seemed a bit hollow after reading an article about destigmatizing abortion. Is it really utopia when women are able to be as disgusting as men?
What exactly is the big problem with stigma? Shouldn't some things be stigmatized? Or will we get to the point where we have acceptance movements for war criminality and mass murder as just another part of the human rainbow?
The sad truth the article highlighted was that one third of American women have had an abortion. Leaving aside the many women who have been raped or have medical issues that put their lives at risks this means that maybe one in three American women has no judgement, no self control, and no intelligence. Of course it isn't that simple...mostly because not every act of unprotected sex makes a fetus, and not in all cases is risking pregnancy a bad idea.
And there, I wrote it. I have zero pity for many women who get abortions in the USA. Women are free not to live as equals of men, but they do have choice, and within whatever group of choices they have, some choices are ethically better. Freedom means responsibility; and almost anyone who finds themselves getting multiple abortions is utterly irresponsible. I once saw a patient who was under 30 and had already seven abortions. The left pro-choice press loves to point out some unlikely case of a woman whose birth control failed, and didn't know she was pregnant until the 7th month...these are not at all the typical cases. In fact one thing that would shock most people is how many married people have abortions. Half of Americans need to be informed that freedom means responsibility. If you want to drive on the green, you will need to stop on the red. It's really that simple or so it should be. But somehow everyone has decided you can drive on the green and the red; and we will create a medical fiction around this idea. We will literally pull in some cases viable babies from the womb and kill them. We will fail ethically, and then congratulate ourselves as "feminists." Real feminism would empower women to control their reproductive choices before they result in medical operations whether those operations be abortions or IVF surrogacy.
An even more distorted issue is that of prostitution. Al Jazeera ran a social media discussion of sugar babies. These babies are a technology enabled version of courtesans. Yet the discussion was also around prostitution in general which is of course ludicrous. Having lived in some pretty sketchy neighborhoods I can tell you a technology enabled courtesan is not the same thing as a street corner hooker. Is a well paid civil engineer the same as a man who works the dingiest scariest mining job without a helmet? In one of my old neighborhoods if you got close enough to the prostitutes you could usually see the scars on them. Clients would do things like pushing them through windows.
Prostitution is a job like any other in many aspects, but the media seems to focus in on the supposedly tragic plight of well heeled white chicks. Other classes and colors of prostitutes hooking out in the hood or third world will not be appearing for interviews on the philosophical implications of selling their bodies for money. They will be servicing an unspeakable number of men between getting beat up by their pimps. It's not that they are too stupid to know there are better jobs for hookers. Prostitution places a very exact value in terms of earning potential on a woman. In the anglosphere that value approximates a woman's marital value. I recently got reminded of my own lack of value when I semi-accidentally interviewed to be a prostitute.
I have worked as a choreographer and performer of cabaret for many years including the years I spent finishing my medical degree. I responded to an advertisement for dancer to find myself in what was actually a whorehouse. I was told that I was not a good candidate to be a whore. I wouldn't sell enough. I was also told as a side point that wouldn't fit in anyways. Well, I suppose not. I like to think I must have seemed the man in a fancy tuxedo for the job of selling T-shirts. Unfortunately, the reality is closer to the metaphor of me showing up in a T-shirt to sell tuxedos. The best clothing in this case is white skin, blond hair and nice teeth. I have one out of three. Most local girls who have all three are highly sought after in the real marriage market (as opposed to this distorted distilled one), and well educated to boot. Therefore high end prostitution establishments bring Caucasian women from the former Soviet Union on tourist visas. But these women are hardly winners. My time slickly questioning the club owners during my interview revealed that their business strategy is towards extracting maximum profits from each hooker. These hookers essentially pay a lot of money to the establishment to work and have a few amenities (guards, beds and so on). Based on their pay rate these women seem to be doing rather well, but this is in reality a fiction, and these women can easily fall into debt to the club owners. The easiest business and survival model at that point for these women becomes theft. Thus local prostitutes have become infamous for getting foreign businessmen drunk, or even drugging them, then stealing their cash. I'm pretty sure most women would rather just get a job in construction or even cleaning than enter such a tailspin of misery. Yet AlJazeera's vision of feminism is one in which women are liberated to sell their bodies and abort the babies later. This vision of feminism is nothing but medicalized misogyny. Unfortunately this vision of feminism is projected as the vanguard of avaunt guard thought. Paradoxically mainstream feminism has become more anti-woman than middle of the road conservatism.
Feminists question why some women are uneasy with the label. Perhaps the reason is that feminism does not always mean equality in any positive sense. Any reasonable person would embrace equality, but at the edge feminism is pushing squarely against it.
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