Suckered again

Too bad, it would have been great for TLS to have an alum on the Supreme Court, plus Edith is such a retro-cool name. Plus it chafes just a little to see the first woman on the court replaced by yet another white guy.

I think I've demonstrated that my psychic powers are piss-poor, whether used to predict the future of my love life or politics.

So, about this Roberts fellow--it could have been worse, I guess. Except that the abortion thing is worrying. I know that there is a possibly insurmountable philosophical divide between my view of humanity as nature's glorious accident and the idea that each individual human life is deliberately and consciously shaped by god. But in practical terms, as long as humanity exists as we know it, you will never stop teenagers from fucking each other, you will never get everyone to be responsible about birth control, you will never limit sex within the confines of marriages, you will never get to the point where every pregnancy is planned and wanted and you will never, ever, ever prevent some women and girls from aborting or trying to abort their pregnancies. The goverment can't stop that and ought not to try. I guess you could say the same of murder or crime in general, but I simply do not accept that killing a fetus is analogous to killing a person who has an established existence in this world. In any case, illegal abortions are liable to kill more than just the fetus.

Young women are increasingly "pro-life," they are increasingly conservative and romanticize some kind of 50s ideal of love, marriage and women's role in society. But they do so from the privileged position of having choices. Their career options go beyond secretary, teacher or nurse. They can marry who they want and get a divorce if the marriage proves to be oppressive. Motherhood is a choice for them, not a default setting. They don't appreciate what they have, or how much they would regret losing it.

Although I've demonstrated that I'm bad at predicting the future, I do think that in the natural course of a secular society, the balance of power will gradually tip in favor of women. By that I DON'T mean that men will or should be oppressed in the way that, historically, women were. I mean that, speaking in averages and generalities, women are somewhat better suited to thriving in this society as it is evolving, and are coming to need men less than men need women. But the power of women, actual and potential, is completely terrifying to many (maybe most) people, including women. In fact, I think that fear is one of the main engines of fundamentalism.

Yes, I am a feminist, with no equivocation or apology. Yes, I like men and sympathize with them--academic victim feminisim has been too hostile to them, and has at least partially earned the beating it's taken. But I'm not inferior to any man. I'm smarter than most of them and probably braver and tougher than a good many, too. I'm not going to shrink myself down for the sake of getting along with them, which might be why I'm single. But so be it--that's the beauty of this society right now--I don't need a man, I can make my own living and buy my own house and get laid (in theory) without compromising my freedom. If I'd been born 50 years earlier, that wouldn't be so easy to say.