Relax and enjoy it, ladies. Here comes the Progressive Democratic Party with another plan for you to take care of its needs.

I don’t actually care all that much about the women who will have to pay for their own abortions after Representative Stupak and the others added their amendment. There are only a few hundred thousand insured women needing abortions, compared with the millions of really poor women trying to buy their constitutional rights after the (Democratic) Congress took abortion out of Medicaid in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. Hey, women rich or lucky enough to have private insurance, welcome to the crowd of the people who can’t protect their interests (“women”). Your fate was sealed when the Democrats sold out poor women 30 years ago. And women let them do it.

We game theorists call people who let them do it “chickens.” Remember “Chicken?” Two people get in cars and drive head on at each other. The first one to swerve is the chicken. He or she survives that time, sure, but after that? They’re stew. Nobody swerves when playing Chicken with someone they know is a chicken. So in every successive race, the chicken has to keep on swerving. Every time he swerves, he sinks a little lower.

The guys learned how to play Chicken watching old James Dean movies, if not driving their hot rods at one another in high school. Here’s how the legendary misogynist Philip Roth played Chicken with his wife, actress Claire Bloom: Early in their relationship, Roth insisted that Bloom's daughter Anna Steiger move out of her London home. "It wasn't about hatred for my daughter,” Bloom reminisced years later in the November 1996 Vanity Fair.

He knew I would make any compromise to support our relationship. If I was willing to jettison my daughter in this manner, what could I ever deny him? I know I was diminishing my own character with each successive act of capitulation. These confrontations left me debilitated and unsure, and were to shape many of my future decisions.

In 1980, four years after the heavily Democratic Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, women rewarded the Democrats by voting more heavily Democratic than men did for the first time. If I was willing to jettison my daughter in this manner, what could I ever deny him? No one has been willing to stay the course against the anti-choice forces since. The federal government, under Democrats and Republicans alike, went on to cut off abortion funding from international aid (the Helms Amendment), costing millions of women around the world their health and often their lives. Slowly, they are driving at the remains of reproductive rights—parental consent, late-term abortion, now insurance for the bourgeoisie. Too often, the anti-choice vehicle is carrying Democratic men and the women who love them. This latest development is only the most visible example. That’s what it’s like when everyone knows you are chicken.

Maybe the women and their pro-choice allies in Congress will reach the gag level at last and withhold their votes from the Dems’ precious health care reform. Even Claire Bloom eventually moved out. Leaving Roth to live out his waning days alone.

Tags: abortion, health care

Emily and Marjorie, don't you think we ask ourselves different questions about Major Nidal Hasan because he wasn't just a Muslim or jihadist, he was also a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces? It's easy to reduce the 9/11 terrorists to pure villains. Because Hasan was truly one of us—born here of an immigrant family, like 20 percent of the population—this feels different.

Both Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Brooks fault the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting as a willful avoidance of the obvious. Emily agreed with Rabinowitz, saying that we as a nation find it "more comfortable to look away from his religious beliefs for an alternate theory." Brooks claimed that looking beyond Islamic extremism to the other factors affecting Hasan "sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment."

I'd argue that we're looking beyond his religious beliefs because that's what we as a society do. When we look at other religiously motivated domestic terrorists, like Eric Randolph (who bombed both the Olympic Park and an abortion clinic), we don't accept religion alone as a motivation. It's just not enough to explain how an American would look other Americans in the face and then end their lives.

Marjorie, you're right that a "rush to judgment, and willingness to accept bits and pieces of information as a whole picture of a fractured man we have yet to fully know," would be wrong. But I don't think that's what's happening. I think we're all engaged, publicly and privately, in trying to understand not just why something like this happens, but how to keep it from happening again—and wrestling with the fact that, inevitably, it will. When we question the ways that Hasan's former colleagues were bothered by his behavior, we're trying to understand how his behavior was different without using 20-20 hindsight to attack everyone who ever knew him. When we look at his life outside the base and the mosque, we're doing our best to wrap our minds around the incomprehensible.

If we write Hasan off as nothing but a religious zealot, we're missing the bigger picture. This shooter wasn't some mysterious other or foreign power. He was, like Timothy McVeigh, like Seung-hui Cho, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a citizen of the United States—and he chose a particularly American methodology for his terror. People in other countries (other than those at war) just aren't as inclined to shoot up their schools and workplaces. When we put aside the idea of Hasan as part of a jihad, we're not avoiding reality—we're looking it squarely in the face. We have met the enemy, and far too often, he is us.

Photograph of the skyline with Twin Towers on homepage by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: ft hood, maj. nidal malik hassan, Terrorism

The British Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology recently published one of those "no duh" studies, this time indicating that it might not be the greatest idea in the world to have a plastic surgeon hack away at your genitals so you can look in the bedroom like a flat picture in Playboy post-airbrushing. This topic brings to mind many opportunities for making merriment, but the funniest part of the whole thing by far for me is that this research is controversial at all. Reading between the lines of the BBC article, it's clear that the dispute is over whether or not it's legitimate to deem it a "sexual problem" worth medical intervention when you're partnered with a man who regularly vocalizes his belief that he's entitled to have an airbrushed vulva before him. Or, to spread the blame around, whether or not it's a medical issue if a woman has looked at a great deal of porn and has decided that she's broken because she doesn't fit the mold.

The plastic surgeons defending this source of income—and their own hang-ups about women's genitalia—use a heavy dose of B.S. According to this research, women are on record complaining that their labia are so excessively long that it interferes with pants-wearing and bicycle-riding. But in a moment I'm going to write off as classic British humor, the researchers suggested that male genitalia tends to stick out much further than female genitalia, with no noticeable rejection of pants-wearing from men due to pain. I'm reminded of those women who claim to forget to eat—what an awfully convenient malfunction. On your way to better pants-wearing and bike-riding, if you so happen to get, in the words of one of the interviewed plastic surgeons, a more "elegant-looking" labia, then it's just a happy accident.

Of course, like all surgery, slicing back your labia tends to create at least some scar tissue, though hopefully a good plastic surgeon minimizes that. And scar tissue decreases sensitivity. Which would tend to make those of us with an unpleasantly strong interest in women's subjective experience wonder how on earth this surgery fixes sexual problems. But of course, if you think of women's main sexual function not as feeling pleasure, but being a catalyst for male pleasure, then all becomes clear.

I sympathize, honestly. It's distracting to have imperfections while naked with a man, after spending most of your day outside the bedroom, where you're confronted with an endless stream of airbrushed female flesh. Being a human being with idiosyncratic features can feel weird after taking in the cultural obsession with cookie-cutter beauty, and if you're cursed with a partner willing to vocalize his disappointment with your human body, it can be even worse. But it's a shame that most of us absorb this nonsense.

The sad thing is, if you can clear your head of all this perfectionist, conformist pressure, appreciating people's little differences can be more fun and certainly more sexy than achieving temporary adherence to strict beauty standards. In fact, I often look at the sea of airbrushing and plastic surgery and Brazilian waxing, and I see a profound prudery at the bottom of it, a fear of truly embracing sexuality. The airbrushed plastic perfection promoted by Playboy and Maxim magazine are to sex as EPCOT Center is to world travel: experience simulation for those too cowardly to truly dive in, but too egotistical to admit their cowardice.

Tags: airbrushing, plastic surgery

In reading all the accounts from fellow pro-choice women—like Emily's from earlier this week—bemoaning the Stupak abortion restrictions, I noticed that many of the women who were outraged by the concessions of the health care bill used the terms feminist and pro-choice almost interchangably. Over at Salon, Kate Harding writes, "Feminists have been up in arms about the latest assault on access to abortion," but if you take one look at the website for the group Feminists for Life, one of the first things you see is the banner proclaiming "Women the Winners in U.S. House Amendment Vote."

Also on Salon, a year ago, Catherine Price wondered whether you can be pro-life and feminist. She muses:

I think the question is interesting because in some ways it's emblematic of a big problem not just in the battle over abortion but in American politics in general: a complete refusal to see any part of the opposition's argument. I like to think that there are often more shades of gray, more nuance, than just the black and white lines down which we are currently divided—and this is a great example.

But actually, when it comes to things like the Stupak Amendment, things are absolutely black and white: If this thing goes through, it will be impossible for a huge chunk of American women to get abortions. The fight over this amendment reveals what a mess the feminist movement is. Women who care about feminism want it to be more inclusive, because we believe that many women are merely turned off by the label, but there have been so many concessions about the term (almost like there have been so many concessions on the health care bill) that it's devolved. In an article from The New Republic last year about Sarah Palin and her membership in Feminists for Life, Michelle Cottle broke it down: "Feminism seems no longer to denote a particular set of values or ideological agenda; it is merely a label appropriated to proclaim that one is committed to the best interests of women—whatever one believes those to be."

Fissures in the feminist movement are also the subject of Ariel Levy's excellent piece in this week's New Yorker about Gail Collins' When Everything Changed and Leslie Sanchez's You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman. Levy wonders, "[W]hy has feminism, which managed to win so many battles—the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly unexceptionable—remained anathema to millions of women who are the beneficiaries of its success?" Maybe because there are still issues where feminists can't be gentle and nuanced and inclusive. To rally women against the Stupak Amendment, feminists need to be willing to offend.

Tags: ariel levy, feminism, kate harding, pro-choice, pro-life, Sarah Palin, stupak amendment

Emily,

When you say: “Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military, we embrace fanatics in our midst,” you're surely not suggesting, are you, that military generals would purposely sacrifice the lives of dozens of soldiers, simply for the sake of political correctness? I mean, there is a middle ground between withholding judgment and “embracing fanatics in our midst,” isn’t there?

I don’t believe for a minute that these generals would risk the lives of 1.3 million U.S. military personnel on active duty (another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces.) if they thought Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, or any of the 10,000 to 20,000 Muslims who serve in the U.S. armed forces, posed a terrorist risk. The “quest for diversity” that you, and the others you quote, think may have driven military brass to protect this “jihadist,” is a weak justification. The military is one of the most diverse institutions in this country and its policy of intolerance, at least on paper, toward racial and religious bigotry is a good thing and should be upheld, not criticized and discredited because of one crazy shooter. The policy is in place to keep cohesion among people of various races, religions, and cultures who have to work together, fight wars together, protect each other’s back and protect us back home—together.

This rush to judgment, and willingness to accept bits and pieces of information as a whole picture of a fractured man we have yet to fully know, is just plain wrong. Maybe in the end we’ll learn that Hassan was indeed motivated, in part or in whole, by terrorist sympathies, but it still would not prove that the military was protecting him for diversity’s sake.

Just because someone spews religious, racial, or gender-based hatred while committing a despicably violent act doesn’t mean they aren’t certifiably crazy. In fact, some of the most virulent anti-Semites and other racists are in fact motivated by mental illness and irrational psyches. No one who has read the online rants of James von Brunn, the white supremacist who killed the black security guard during an attack on the holocaust museum in D.C., could ever argue the man is sane. Same goes for those who’ve bombed abortion clinics and killed abortion doctors.

Major Hassan is said to have complained about anti-Muslim slurs hurled at him by fellow servicemen. Maybe these alleged insults were all imagined in his head, maybe they really occurred and drove his actions. I don’t know. (None of us knows for sure.) What I do know is that all this speculation about religious zealotry being his sole motivation is irresponsible and hypocritical.

When Steven Green, a young, mentally ill soldier shot and killed an Iraqi family and, along with four fellow soldiers, repeatedly raped the family’s 14-year-old daughter before killing her too, the word “terrorist” was never attached to Green’s name even though military psychologists said he harbored deep-seated hatred for Iraqis. He was the ringleader among the group, all of them in their early 20s. No one called for barring all young Christian men from serving in the military because they might all turn out to be gun-happy sociopaths on a mission to kill and rape as many innocent Iraqis as possible. Yet many people are now saying Muslims should be barred from serving.

Green was sentenced in May to life in prison without parole. According to the NYT:

In the sentencing phase of the trial, the Army stress counselor, Lt. Col. Karen Marrs, a mental health nurse practitioner, testified that Pvt. Green was disturbed by deaths in his unit and had expressed a desire to hurt Iraqi civilians. But Colonel Marrs also said such sentiments had been expressed by other members of the unit and were not uncommon among troops in combat. On questioning from the prosecution, she also said that she thought Private Green clearly understood that hurting civilians would be wrong and that he had no plans to act on his anger.

The defense argued that the Army should have provided stronger leadership to Private Green’s unit and should have removed Private Green from front-line duty for more intensive mental health care.

The prosecution strenuously rejected that argument, saying that many combat troops faced the same kinds of trauma and stress as Private Green and his platoon but that few committed atrocities.

So what do these incidents tell us? That maybe the military’s problem is ineptness and not political correctness. Given that the U.S. military is engaged in two wars and is stretched to the limits, is it any wonder that some mentally troubled soldiers fall through the cracks?

Tags: diversity in u.s. military, fort hood shooting, maj. nidal malik hassan, mental illness, Terrorism