I can't believe we still have to protest this stuff.

I cannot believe we still need to address the unrivaled ignorance of total idiots like Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) who said women can’t get pregnant from rape — he called it “legitimate rape,” presumably meaning she was really raped and not fake-raped. The levels of insult are like an onion: they just go on and on.

When will the attacks on women stop? When will this crap be over? I can’t believe we are still arguing this bullshit now in 2012. I had so much good, local stuff to rant about this week, yet here I am, forced to address the idiocy of someone who is in a position of power, real power, over women’s lives. It cannot be ignored because this guy is on the SCIENCE Committee in Congress: That’s Congress with a capital “C.” The United States Congress. ARRGHHH!!!! AND, he has a good chance of becoming a senator, of the U.S. Yes, THE U.S.

This omnipresent degrading of women is not new. It’s just so disheartening that it still goes on. Hell, people, we had a serious contender for the presidential nomina­tion for president, and a woman vice presidential candidate; we’ve had women in space, running big corporations, winning gold medals.
Yet society still has a million ways to try to make women feel just a little “less.”

(SPOILER ALERT...PARANORMAN THE MOVIE)
In the movie “Paranorman,” the gay reference at the end has people talking. That was okay in my book (but you knew that). What WAS disturbing, were the heterosexual interac­tions: the pretty cheerleader always having to push away the groping teenage boy. And everyone laughs.

Why do they laugh? Why do they think it’s funny? Because it’s against a girl, that’s why. Well, it’s not funny. This is the kind of stuff that sets the tone for women feeling they have less of a right to the integrity of their own bodies. Men are allowed to grab and we’re supposed to laugh it off, just push them away, no big deal. But it is a big deal. Men need to cut the crap. Boys need to cut the crap. Just stop it. Why is that so hard? Because society helps them NOT stop, that’s why.

As a Catholic, I grew up thinking that abortion was not an option. Period. And that it should not be an option for any woman anywhere, ever.

Then I got old enough to understand what that really meant, in a very personal way, for girls...not boys, of course. My political feminism started then, I think, although my feminist thinking probably started when I was five and told I shouldn’t do something because I was a girl. It just wasn’t fair. And that’s all feminism is, really, just trying to make it fair.

It was still a few years, though, before I heard the word “feminist.” “Women’s libber” was the catch-phrase before that, but it wasn’t serious enough to me. I knew I wasn’t that. Everyone who used the term laughed as they said it. When they said “feminist,” they sneered with contempt. That, at least, was serious.

Meanwhile, at my Catholic school, they were actively teaching us that women could not get pregnant from rape, and, at the same time, that rape was often used as a weapon of war to change ethnic make-ups in countries and in regions where civil war was raging among different sects.

I immediately latched onto the contradiction, but no one else seemed to notice. To be honest, I don’t recall if I ever said anything in class about it. I suspect I didn’t.

But just because I may have been silent about it, doesn’t mean I was stupid. I suspected then that it might all just be a ploy; a ploy to keep women down; a ploy to make girls feel their aspirations did not count as much.

I started to figure out that it was just part and parcel of the methods used to make us believe that everything was always our fault.

The horror of rape or near-rape is so real, so difficult, so all-consuming, and so long term. To then think of the horror of getting pregnant from it and having no recourse whatsoever because the law now claims your body. And just for good measure, let’s add the guilt of making it your fault for getting pregnant, not the rapist’s, because you must’ve liked it or you wouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. So bear that child, no matter how young you are; the course of your life has changed, through no action of your own. It’s your destiny. It’s your biology. You must live with it. It’s God’s will.
How does one feel like a worthy human being when all that is being thrown at her? As if being an adolescent isn’t tough enough.

Then I heard, or more likely read, the word “feminist.” Thank you, “Ms. Magazine.” Thank you, “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Thank you, Gloria Steinem. Thank you, Marlo Thomas.

They just made it so clear, what I had known but could not articulate. It is so simple, so fundamental, and so under attack: women cannot be equal if abortion is illegal. It’s that simple. It’s that clear. It’s that necessary. It is step ONE. Anyone who does not acknowledge that is either being dishonest or is just not thinking clearly. No one is saying a woman HAS to have an abortion, just that she can and that the reasons for it are no one’s business but her own.

The Todd Akins of the world, if they had their way, would make it impossible for a woman to get an abortion, even to save her life. Because? Because women don’t count as much as whatever a man has biologically placed inside of her, against her will or not. In 31 states, rapists have the same parental rights as real fathers. Can you believe that?

Men are not held back by their biology: humans have transcended their biology since the beginning of time. The only reason we are at the top of the food chain is because we did not accept our biological limitations. If we had to rely solely on our biological strength, the species would have disappeared a long time ago. If MEN had let biology define THEM and limit THEM, we could not speed along roads at untold miles per hour, fly in the air, or reach the moon.

God, or nature, did not give us wings, but that did not stop us from flying.

Biology won’t stop women either; so step aside, Mr. Akin and those of your ilk, you’ve really pissed us off this time.

We are, simply put, tired of this crap. We want to get to the business of living life and aspiring to greater things, instead of constantly being dragged back to fight off laws attached to our bodies, making it impossible for us just to live life and aspire to greater things.

So keep your laws off our bodies. Get out of our vaginas. Get out of our lives. Take your self-righteous, pompous idiocy and go fishing or something. Just get the hell out of the law-making business. You suck at it.