Daily Life: Review of “The Child Catchers,” by Kathryn Joyce

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

At Daily Life today, I review the new book by Kathryn Joyce, “The Child Catchers: Adoption, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption”:

Decades after what in the USA is referred to as the “baby scoop era”, we recognise that what the Australian government did to unwed mothers and their children was reprehensible. But today, in other countries – Vietnam, for example – the practice of wresting wanted babies from mothers persists, fuelled in part by the evangelical Christian adoption movement.

That movement is the subject of a new book by Kathryn Joyce, an American journalist who has written extensively about evangelical Christians and reproductive politics. (Her previous book, Quiverfull, took a deep look inside the Christian patriarchy movement.)

In the past decade the adoption of orphans, most of them from outside of the US, has become immensely popular among American evangelicals. For many in that community, “saving” orphans kills multiple birds with one stone – Joyce calls it a “perfect storm of a cause”.

It is a way for churches to get involved in poverty and social justice issues that they had ceded years before to liberal denominations, an extension of pro-life politics, and a decisive rebuttal to the taunt that Christians should adopt all those extra children they want women to have. More quietly, it’s also a window for evangelising, as Christians get to “bring the mission field home” and pass on the gospel to a new population of children, effectively “saving them” twice.

You can read the whole thing here.

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The Sydney Morning Herald: Biceps, beauty standards, and Michelle Obama

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

I had a piece published in The Sydney Morning Herald last week, about the spike in upper arm surgery that has been partly attributed to First Lady Michelle Obama:

My first reaction, as a feminist, is to lament that tens of millions of people, 91 per cent of them women, are getting plastic surgery to “fix” the “flaws” on their bodies: their small breasts, their wrinkles, their “unacceptably” un-toned arms. We ought to bemoan the power of the feminine beauty ideal, so narrow that the only way to approximate it is to slice oneself open, and so compelling that people are willing to collectively spend $11 billion a year for that slicing.

And yet, there is something remarkable about Michelle Obama, an African-American woman, being considered so attractive that women will undergo surgery to resemble her. In a country where African-American women have for so long been considered unattractive by default, this is, in some ways, a mark of increasing racial equality.

In the US, as in Australia, the dominant idea of feminine beauty is white. The faces – and bodies – of “beautiful” women in America are still, overwhelmingly, white. A glance at the newsstands in any given week is greeted with a host of white starlets, with the occasional splash of colour. Only a handful of black actresses have won Academy Awards in the nearly century-long history of the event. Vanity Fair’s annual “young Hollywood” issue is notoriously, outrageously devoid of people of colour. The runways at New York Fashion Week are similarly lacking in melanin. The Miss America pageant didn’t start admitting black women until the 1970s, when its prestige was already waning, and it didn’t crown its first black Miss America until 1984. Only six other black women have won the title since. The black women who make it in the mainstream tend to be fair-skinned, with “Anglo” facial features and slight frames, like Halle Berry. Some will argue that megastar Beyonce is an exception to this rule, and they are correct, but only because Beyonce is exceptional in almost every way. As a rule, beautiful is white, and anything else is considered “exotic”, or in the case of dark-skinned black women with “typically black” facial features, outright unattractive.

You can read the whole thing here.

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MSNBC: A victory of squeamishness over science

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

Last week I wrote this piece at MSNBC.com’s Voices, about the Obama administration’s resistance to making Plan B, “the morning after pill,” available over the counter without an age restriction.

The scientific evidence in favor of making the morning after pill available is clear. Anyone with an interest in lowering the rate of abortion in America, or in sparing teenagers the physical, emotional, and financial burden of a pregnancy they haven’t planned and don’t want, ought to welcome the wider availability of the morning after pill. There have been concerns that access to Plan B will make teenagers more likely to have sex.

Obama seemed to share them, despite a lack of evidence, when he argued in 2011 that an age restriction was a good idea.

“As the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” the president said then. He went on to explain that the decision was made after Sebelius felt it was possible that a girl as young as 10 could find the medication “alongside bubble gum or batteries,” and “if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

As uncomfortable as it is for some parents to imagine their teenage children as sexual beings, that discomfort is no excuse for denying all teenagers this form of healthcare.  Evidence shows that readily available contraception, and education on its proper use, makes teenagers less likely to become pregnant before they want to be. A good proportion of American teenagers have sex for the first time at age 15 or earlier, and almost a quarter of them won’t use contraception during that first time they have sex. This means that there are girls under the age of 15 who want and need the morning after pill. There is no evidence, however, that access to contraception makes teenagers more likely to have sex, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is about teen sex that makes us so uncomfortable that we are willing to throw science to the wind.

You can read the whole thing here.

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The Nation: Thinspiration, masturbation, and more

Posted on May 3, 2013 by

Here are the pieces I wrote in the second of two weeks in April that I spent guest blogging at The Nation:

Chrissy Amphlett’s Pleasure Anthem, about the death of the woman who recorded the still-shocking classic “I Touch Myself.”

The ‘Thinspiration’Behind an Impossible Beauty Ideal, about a disturbing social media trend, and what it tells us about our cultural obsession with thinness.

Fat-Shaming All Around Us, about how we talk to and about fat people.

A Pill for Equal Abortion Access, about Australia’s decision to subsidise the abortion pill.

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The Nation: Sexual violence and sex education

Posted on April 20, 2013 by

I’m guest blogging at The Nation this week, and my two most recent posts are on two interrelated topics: sexual violence and sex education. The first I wrote just after attending the Service Women’s Action Network conference, the Truth and Justice summit on military sexual trauma. It’s about what civilian survivors can learn from those who are assaulted in the military – and what the military can teach the rest of us on how not to respond to this problem.

“So, what’s it like to be sitting in a room with so many people who have been sexually assaulted?” My friend was asking because yesterday, I spoke at the Service Women’s Action Network conference, the Truth and Justice Summit on Military Sexual Trauma. I scoffed grimly and texted him back: “Look around the room you’re in now, and ask yourself the same question.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question he’d asked. There is something bone chilling about sitting in a hotel ballroom at full capacity and knowing that almost every person in that room is a survivor of sexual violence. It’s nauseating to remember that most of that violence was inflicted while they were serving their country, and that it was inflicted not by the enemy, but by one of their own. A conservative estimate of the proportion of women in the Armed Forces who have been sexually assaulted is 20 percent. For men, the sheer number of assaults is higher than it is for women. We are talking hundreds of thousands of men and women, in all branches of the military. This week, several hundred of them gathered in Washington, D.C. to talk about their experiences, to discuss policy, and to visit Capitol Hill for a day of lobbying. There were moments in that ballroom, when survivors were talking about how they had suffered, first at the hands of their assailants and then from the military’s efforts to sweep what had happened under the rug, or from the VA’s failure to provide them with care, when you could hear a pin drop. There were moments when the pain, the betrayal and the anger, were almost palpable.

Of course, it’s rare, unless you do sexual violence prevention work, to find yourself in such a room. But statistically speaking, in America, if you’re in a room that contains six women, or a room that contains thirty men, one of them is a survivor of sexual assault. The difference between the ballroom I was in yesterday and almost any other room in this country is that in the ballroom, we actually acknowledged the statistics. We were thinking about them. And most importantly of all, we were talking about the problem.

You can read the whole thing here.

The second post is about Katelyn Campbell, the West Virginia high school student who was threated with administrative retaliation after she refused to attend a mandatory abstinence-only assembly. I took a look at the presentation she would have seen had she gone to that assembly (there’s a link to it in my piece, if you’re inclined to watch it yourself), and wrote about how the messages in that talk dovetail with other anti-choice messages kids will hear once they get out of the classroom. You can read the whole thing here.

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The Nation: After Boston, one foot in front of the other

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

I have a piece in The Nation today, about the attacks at the Boston Marathon yesterday:

In a few weeks’ time, my friend Anthony is having a party. It’s not his birthday, but he is celebrating the fact that he’s alive. He and his friends will get together to mark the one-year anniversary of the day he almost died, but didn’t: an Alive Day party. Among wounded vets, such celebrations aren’t uncommon (“It sounds like pretty much every Jewish holiday,” I joked to Anthony when he told me about his plan. “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat”).

Almost a year ago, Anthony stepped on an IED while out on patrol in Kandahar Province. Technically, he died that day: he flat-lined twice in the helicopter that lifted him out of the explosion site, but he came back. For that, I am profoundly grateful every day. He lost one of his legs below the knee in the blast, and has spent the last year in and out of surgery, learning to use a series of increasingly sophisticated prostheses, and building up his strength again.

Like most people who were fortunate enough to not have loved ones in harm’s way yesterday, I sat in shock at the news out of Boston. I scrolled through my Twitter feed with the kind of disgust and disbelief, that mingled fear and sadness that has become sickeningly familiar to Americans of late. I didn’t rage and I didn’t cry; I just sat there, reading and watching. 

And then I heard the news of marathon runners sustaining serious injuries to their lower extremities, the report from Mass General that several amputations had been performed. People losing calves, and feet. Men and women who had just run a marathon, who run every single day, who have honed their bodies into world-class athletic machines, suddenly without feet, or living without a leg. For reasons I can’t explain, it was that thought that broke my heart.

You can read the whole thing here.

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MSNBC: Lying to women with the “Women’s Right to Know Act”

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

I have a piece at MSNBC’s Voices today, about a new Kansas abortion restriction bill that, among other things, requires doctors to lie to their patients:

The Kansas law would make it almost impossible for people seeking abortions to use their health insurance to cover the procedure, meaning they would have to pay between $500 and $775 out of pocket. Once they have found a way to pay for the abortion, their doctor will be legally required to read them a script that explains that abortion ends the life of “a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” whether or not the doctor believes that. Doctors will also be required to warn patients of a causal link between abortion and breast cancer, which no one who has read the relevant fact-based literature on the matter believes.

This bill is a travesty on multiple fronts. Through the bill, Kansas is enshrining sex discrimination into law by prohibiting the use of insurance funds for a medical procedure that is only required by female Kansans. That provision also will disproportionately harm low-income patients who are far less able to come up with out-of-pocket funds to cover an abortion.

Next, the bill compromises the integrity of doctors by forcing them read from a script they may not agree with and that defies accepted medical facts. Like so many other anti-abortion bills, this one chips away at access to a right that is constitutionally guaranteed. That is precisely the intent and the effect of the bill’s final provision, which also aims to harm the reputations of doctors by barring health professional who work at a clinic that provides abortions from speaking in schools.

You can read the rest here.

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