Year: 2013

Lauren O’Neal pans Holly Grigg-Spall’s forthcoming book, Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control, which insists that the pill is a tool of oppression that separates women from their natural state:

[Grigg-Spall’s] ideal birth-control method … is a secular update to the rhythm method, and we get pages of detail about taking temperatures, checking cervical mucus, observing cervical position, and charting this information every day. Honestly, this all sounds like a wonderful way to avoid pregnancy for women who have the time and inclination and who don’t experience certain menstrual, uterine, and ovarian disorders. For most people, though, it’s impractical. … [T]he book presents birth control as a simple issue. The only criterion a woman need involve in her decision is whether or not a given method is natural and therefore healthy. The demands a job and children make on her time are not factors. Rape, abuse, and coercion are not factors. There is only natural and unnatural.

Marcotte also criticizes the book’s focus on “naturalness”:

Grigg-Spall presents the rhythm method as more natural than the birth control pill, but it can easily be argued that the behavior of monitoring cervical mucus and using technologies like calendars and thermometers is also “unnatural”. Indeed, one of the more irritating problems with the naturalistic fallacy is the tendency to assume that technologies become more “natural” with time, but there was a time before humans were using calendars and the thermometers and clocks used to chart your menstrual cycle are even newer inventions. This tendency to think that technology x time = natural shows how intellectually vapid the entire argument from nature really is. Bizarrely, nothing is more natural than developing new technologies to make our lives easier, in the sense of “natural” meaning “inherent to humanity” or “hardwired”.

Kelly Bourdet’s bottom line on the book:

Sweetening the Pill will appeal to many people who believe in the power of collective menstruation, the rightness of our connection to moon phases, and the oppression of patriarchal capitalism. But it’s not going to convince many women who feel they “need” birth control to switch to other methods.

But Bourdet also highlights some constructive parts of Sweetening the Pill and the troubling aspects of hormonal contraception featured in the book:

The alteration of testosterone [by the pill] factors into women’s choice of sexual partners and mates. A study from last year revealed that women on hormonal birth control—which suppresses naturally occurring testosterone—were attracted to men with lower testosterone levels (usually the opposite is true). However when women go off of the pill, and their testosterone levels increase, their attraction to their partners decreased. This is a powerful, life-altering side effect to be sure. And it’s fair to wonder whether a drug that could alter our choice in long-term partners is too powerful for comfort. …

In a constructive suggestion on how women unhappy on their birth control can still control their fertility, Grigg-Spall quotes from Heather Corinna’s article, “Love the Glove”:

If we’re going to talk about condoms changing how sex feels, we need to remember that something like the pill does too, and unlike condoms, it changes how a woman feels all the time, both during and outside of sex. Condoms are the least intrusive and demanding of all methods of contraception.

Though less effective (given perfect adherence and use) than birth control, the essay brings up an excellent point. We frame access to hormonal contraception as a hard won right for women—and it is—but neglect to represent the idea that it has its consequences. The idea that condoms muffle sexual sensation in a burdensome way for men, and thus hormonal solutions are “better,” is an extension of a worldview that women are solely responsible for both providing sexual pleasure and for controlling their own fertility. While some women don’t experience uncomfortable side effects when taking the pill, some do, and it’s important to consider men equally capable in taking steps to prevent pregnancy.

People underestimate the risk of catastrophic events when they can’t think of any recent ones:

Take the possibility of a major impact by an asteroid or other near-Earth object. The last impact that did serious damage was the Tunguska event over central Russia in 1908 (though there was no actual impact with the surface of the Earth—an asteroid or comet roughly 300 feet across apparently exploded in the air). Small wonder, then, that “20 years ago the near-Earth-object field practically didn’t exist,” says Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s near-Earth-object program. … Back then, “we had ‘the giggle factor’ when it was mentioned that these objects could be dangerous and could be looked for,” Yeomans says. “People would laugh and say, ‘Yeah, when was the last time?’ Simply because we didn’t see them, they didn’t take the threat as seriously as we have come to.”

But in 1993, astronomers Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker and David Levy spotted a comet (now called Shoemaker-Levy 9) on a collision course with Jupiter.

Millions saw the incredible video of the massive explosions. There were 21 separate impacts, the largest of which was 600 times more powerful than the entire world’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The crater it left was 7,500 miles across, almost big enough to reach from the North Pole to Rio de Janeiro. A single impact like that would have wiped out life on Earth. The movies Armageddon and Deep Impact followed in the next few years, along with a couple of ultimately false alerts from the astronomy community about possible near-Earth objects headed our way that got huge press coverage. In the past 10 years, funding for NASA’s work to spot objects that might collide with Earth has gone from practically nothing to more than $20 million a year, and we’ve located more than 90 percent of the big ones that could do serious damage.

In today’s video, Kate explains what effect being a proponent of singlehood has had on her dating life, as well as what she envies about the lives of her married friends and family:

Kate is currently working on her first book, Among the Suitors: On Being a Woman, Alone, to be published next year by Crown/Random House. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and writes regularly for Elle, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. Her 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies”, addressed why more and more women are choosing, as she has, not to get married. The Dish debated the piece here and here. A reader responds to the first AA video we aired of Kate:

In my experience, Bolick is completely wrong.  The idea that friends will fill in the gaps where a spouse or family used to be is nonsense.

Outside of spouses and children, who are most likely to feel a bond and an obligation, there are very, very few relationships that oblige someone to go through the sorrow and exhaustion of caregiving that often goes on for years, with no end in sight.  And if Kate believes that home healthcare workers and aides work well without constant family supervision, then she’s clearly got no experience related to this topic. Anyone who has put a loved one in a home or been their healthcare proxy while in the hospital knows damn well the system doesn’t work well when no one is watching out for the patient besides those in the system.  It requires constant strategizing and supervision.

The caregiving that is needed isn’t anywhere on its way to materializing for the single people among us. I just went through the wringer as the primary caregiver for my sister who passed away in April. She was 50 and unmarried. If not for me, there would have been no one to look after her and she would have been warehoused in a nursing home until she passed away. Maybe she would have gotten the same level of care without someone looking out for her (which I do doubt), but who would have held her hand and sat by her side?

I am also not married, but I’m terrified about what will happen to me later in life without children to look after me.

The first dissenter follows up:

Thank you for publishing my email. I just wanted to clarify a couple things. First, my point was not that you had argued a discussion of male physiology should be substituted for one of rape culture. Rather, it was that this substitution was a likely rhetorical effect of your response to Bruni. I don’t think that effect was intended. But rape culture is reinforced as much by such effects as it is by explicit arguments.

To take a more obviously egregious example, when someone asks a woman who’s been raped, “Why didn’t you fight back?”, the intention of the question could be a whole range of things – curiosity, trying to elicit whether the rapist had a weapon or whether she was drugged, etc. But the effect of the question, when asked within a culture that tends to disbelieve and shame women who’ve been raped (unless the rape was committed by the near-mythical stranger in the bushes with a knife), is to dissuade her from reporting or talking about the rape.

Second, I’m increasingly unclear on the grounds of your criticism of Bruni’s op-ed. How is your call for a culture of male virtue fundamentally different from Bruni’s call for a culture of masculinity that’s not centered around the denigration and sexual conquest of women?

Both, unless I’m misunderstanding you, would make it socially unacceptable to treat women as objects for domination and violence and, as a result, would make it much harder for rapists, who rely on a culture that tacitly okays treating women that way, to get away with their crimes. So how, then, does testosterone fit it in to all this? Are you actually suggesting that not making rape jokes or calling out other men who let slip that they try to have sex with women who are too drunk to consent goes against the grain of the male psyche? If so, I suspect a lot of your male readers would take personal offense. If not, why worry about how to make this change in a way that’s compatible with testosterone – especially since scientists still know very little about how testosterone interacts with culture.

Given what a red herring male physiology has been (and often still is) among people who think men just can’t help themselves around a women who is too attractive, too drunk, etc., why not just keep the focus on telling men not to rape – and not to valorize those who do?

First point: As a writer I have long believed that my job is to express what I believe is true, and worrying about how such an argument could affect or be used by others is a very secondary mission. I cannot control what others will do with my arguments; I can only really control my own words. When you see previous controversies – race and IQ, the end of plagues, the differences between men and women, the rights of bigots to free speech – you can see where I’m coming from. I cannot write while looking over my shoulder – and won’t start now.

Second: yes, I wrote that I agreed with much of what Frank proposed. I’m just under no illusion that will “solve” the problem because cultural change can only do so much against the violence associated with testosterone. And I think it will be more successful if it comes at this issue with a positive vision of masculinity rather than an assumption that masculinity is only a social construct, and is itself the problem. The other dissenter also writes back:

I’m writing to thank you for taking my argument seriously, and for addressing it publicly. You rightly call my argument out as a liberal one. Indeed it is. My fundamental problem with the conservatism you admire is that it too often overlooks past injustices in its desire to hold on to (often worthy) older values.

While I still strongly disagree with you, I have great respect for your willingness to be open to critique, and to engage in civil discussion of difficult issues. These virtues render your blog a public asset, particularly at a time when shrieking extremism too often passes for debate. And it’s why I plan to continue reading the Dish for years to come.

I also am grateful for the sharp input and pushback from such intelligent, probing readers. It’s this civil interaction that this blog aspires to – not a final word, but a continuing conversation.