I was reading one of Amanda Marcotte's recent posts over at Pandagon. It's about the misogynistic language used by the anti-choice movement, and this passage jumped out at me.
What they fail to understand is that “life begins at conception” is a misogynist statement. It’s the erasure of a woman’s role in making new people, and a claim that the only effort that counts is the effort a man put into ejaculating. Abortion is horrifying because it’s a reminder that men do not actually make babies, but that women do through a 9 month process, and that if a woman chooses to interrupt that process, there will not be a baby. Which is pretty conclusive proof that men don’t make babies. Which directly contradicts the misogynist belief that only men are capable of really doing jobs worth doing.
What Marcotte is describing here is the phenomenon that psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885-1952) called "womb envy." Basically, boys and men are jealous of women because women have the ability to go through pregnancy and nursing. Women can find fulfillment from creating new life and from enhancing their own lives through work outside the home. Since men can't give birth, they can only turn to the outside world for personal fulfillment. She believed that the womb envy that is experienced by males is the source of denying women equal rights, blaming women for the perceived downfall of society, and demonizing women's sexuality. Whatever your feelings about pregnancy, I think Horney makes a clearly pro-choice, pro-woman point. "Life begins at conception" is a way for anti-choice men to claim a piece of the womb they secretly covet by claiming sole responsibility for the creation of the next generation. I think Marcotte applies the concept of womb envy beautifully in the passage I quoted, even if she didn't mean to.
But what about anti-choice women? They have wombs, so do they experience womb envy too? I think so, but in a different way. On the subject of misogynistic women, Marcotte explains the benefits of hating your own gender, like moral superiority and being one step closer to being part of the powerful patriarchy. But to be a misogynistic woman, one has to sacrifice the ownership of one's own womb. Anti-choice women are caught between gaining a slice of the patriarchy pie and having control of their own reproduction. I'll give anti-choice women the benefit of the doubt and say that they haven't been completely brainwashed and don't really like having more children than their bodies, minds, and budgets can handle. Most anti-choice women don't have "as many children as the good Lord gives," and they'll explain away the dozens of kids they would have if they practiced what they preached by pushing abstinence. So, the womb envy that anti-choice women feel is directed toward feminist women who have managed to find social influence and personal fulfillment while feeling entitled to control their own wombs. How do we do it?
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What about pro-choice men? They battle everyday with their "womb envy"?
I didn't get into pro-choice anybody. And I don't know if Horney talked about abortion issues, as she lived in a sexually repressed time over 100 years ago. I suppose Horney would say that even pro-choice men have womb envy, since even pro-choice men benefit from male privilege and the oppression of women.
I always thought that 'womb envy' was a recation to Freud's idea of penis envy, and the acedemic discourse went along the lines of
Freud: Women want to be men!
Horney: No way, men want to be women!
Freud: lalalalalawomenwanttobemenlalalala
and so forth.
I really didn't believe that people ascribed to penis/womb envy.
I also don't see how defining life at conception is misogynistic. Conception is when the egg (female contribution) and sperm (male contribution) come together. It seems to be an egalitarian definition. Life doesn't occur at ejaculation or ovulation alone. It not men or women alone, but when they come together.
The Pandagon post seemed to be nothing more than ad homeim attacks against whoever the author disagreed with.
In regards to pro-life women:
Also, by tai-chi-ing the arguement of life begins at conception to an arguement of being inherantly mysogisistic she attempts to create straw men out of the pro-life movement.The terms of the abortion discouse (pro-life, pro-choice, anti-choice and pro-death, et cetera) all loaded terms. The readers here at Feministing know that pro-choice is not pro-death, but alot are willing to see all sorts of evil in someone who calls themselve pro-life.
I wonder the writer at pandagon has ever talked to someone who is truley pro-life, and not just anti-choice. Someone who works with the poor becuase being pro-life is also being concerned about the quality of life that people live. Someone who is anti-war and spent over 40 years active in the civil rights movement. Someone who if they saw someone considering an aportion would say with heartfelt compassion "how can I help?" and not "Your going to burn in hell."
I lean pro-choice becuase I beleive that the mother is in the best positin to decide for her health and the quality of life for the child (and for a lot of other reasons as well). But I know people out there who are pro-life out of compassion. People who are pious and filled with love, and it rubs me the wrong way when someone tries to demonize them.
I always thought that 'womb envy' was a recation to Freud's idea of penis envy, and the acedemic discourse went along the lines of
Freud: Women want to be men!
Horney: No way, men want to be women!
Freud: lalalalalawomenwanttobemenlalalala
and so forth.
I really didn't believe that people ascribed to penis/womb envy.
I don't think any of that is a fair estimation of their theories. And while penis and womb envy are antiquated concepts, personality theorists have been spending the past century expanding on psychoanalytic points of view or coming up with counterpoints. Parts of the theories can still be applied to today.
And you will have to read Marcotte's post and watch the video that went with it. I certainly can't explain it any better than she did. I can only agree with what she said and repeat it, which I already did.
I thought Penis Envy, as conceived by Freud, was the desire of women to have a penis becuase it represents masculinity, which is viewed as powerful. Unable to have their own penis, women desire the penis of their father (and Freud gets a little weird thereon out).
So, penis envy is anxiety for being dickless, or from not being a man. => Penis envy is a desire to be man. (I have not read any orignal text, so maybe I got it wrong.)
Womb envy is the anxiety that men feel b/c they cannot give birth, this anxiety leads them to subjugate women, because as men, they are womb-less. If they could just obtain a womb they would not have to subjugate woman.
I stand by my original assertion.
What you just described is not the same as wanting to be a man or wanting to be a woman, which is what you said first. So are you standing by what you initially said, or the totally different thing you just said?
I'm going to preface this by saying that I graduated with a BA in Psychology.
Psychoanalytics is what's called "armchair psychology". There's no scientifically discernible evidence of its being true, but also done in such a way of making it false. As such, it hangs in psychological limbo neither being used nor trashed because there's literally nothing that can be done about it because of its ambiguous status of "unscientifically testable".
As for Freud vs. Horney, it wasn't exactly as Steven had put it. Horney was reacting to Freud's admonishment of the male over the female. The idea of "womb envy" was born (forgive the pun) after she had made an off-hand comment about men having womb envy because a woman could do things a man couldn't do. From there, it took a life of its own.
It's an interesting concept, but not one that can be readily traced from or proven by anything that psychology uses to develop and critique its theories. Not disproven, but not proven either.
You don't have to tell me that. I have a BA in Psychology as well. I suppose I'm taking advantage of the fact that nothing I just said can't be proven to be false. But the fact that so many people want to control the reproductive lives of women, it makes me think there's plenty of womb envy out there.
You're assuming that every person in the world holds a strictly materialist ontological paradigm; ie, that there is no soul or human essence but the sum of our experiences as memorized by the brain.
If an anti-choice person did not think that souls existed, then yes, when that individual asserts that homo sapien entities are entitled to autonomous personhood at conception, it would be a malicious denial of women's rights.
If they thought that souls do exist, however, then they have the right to believe in whatever they want concerning when the body receives an essence.
Women of a certain hunter-gatherer society in Africa have to carry all of their belongings in addition to their child, and it is customary in this society for them to carry their children until they are several years old. Therefore children are a big investment of time for these women, and after childbirth has taken place in a location far away from everyone else, it is the mother's duty to inspect the newborn for defects and smother it to death if they have to. In this society, you are not a Real Person until you are given a name and taken back to the tribe. These people believe that ensouling occurs after naming.
People of an Abrahamic faith can vary in what they say about this issue, but they generally believe the magical point happens sometime before childbirth. And so they'd obviously be outraged at the intentional elimination of a fetus, operating with this viewpoint (how they'd feel about the fact that half of all fertilized zygotes don't even make it to birth, I don't personally know). Anyways, the point is that I'm pretty sure that this doesn't have anything to do with the patriarchal attitudes of fundamentalist Christianity, but instead relates to the question of whether you're a stoic or an epicurean.
I don't really care about souls. I see the soul as a human invention that only has the purpose of giving worth to some living things and justifying abuse of other living things. So "life begins when the soul enters the body" isn't any less oppressive than "life begins at conception" in my opinion.
Without a soul, is life meaningless?
No. I don't see how absence of a soul makes life meaningless. Many people believe that certain living things have no souls, like animals and trees. I wouldn't say their existence is meaningless. In fact, we depend on animals and plants to live. Few animals and plants need us for the same. Yet, many people use the argument that, because animals and trees have no souls, it doesn't really matter if we abuse our power and exploit these living things. I believe that it doesn't make any difference whether or not anything has a soul. We still have to treat all living things with respect.
Are you saying that we invented souls to assuage our guilt at eating meat? (Or, in the case of dehumanizing any group classified as Other, killing members of the other tribe/nation/class/sex?)
That's highly dismissive of the Theory of the Soul's purpose in explaining life before we had developed the biological sciences, or of its purpose in arguing for a true human essence, upon which one can form a baseline for establish inalienable human rights. Not to mention the hopes people place upon the existence of a soul for reincarnation or life after death.
In my opinion, we should not have to resort to such existentially pretentious (as in assuming the pretense that everyone agrees with your views on the existence of a soul) arguments to show that the government does not have the right to make our decisions for us.
Really? Because I said this was my opinion and used "I" twice. I didn't say that everyone does think this way or should think this way or that I'm somehow superior for having this opinion. So I don't know if this is a response to what I said or a response to something someone else said to you.
Echoing others:
That's good for you, but not solid for anything more than a personal "say what you want, but I think you're full of shit". Not to mention incredibly dismissive of other viewpoints -- many of which on BOTH sides hold the idea that the soul exists.
Hey, if you want a laugh, check out this idiot:
http://lucaslabrador.blip.tv/file/809870/
At about 2:20 he says:
Here's another where he elaborates on his biologically inaccurate wingnuttery:
http://lucaslabrador.blip.tv/file/759933/
It's at about 9:40 'god put the life in the men, not in the women.'
Before we all get lost in debates about soul and whatnot, I think it's important to remember that the right wing anti-choicers are highly invested in the CONCEPT of the fetus, not the actual living thing. The fetus, as an image, holds a symbolic, almost mythical quality. It symbolizes LIFE ITSELF (creepy god voice). It's only the concept that the right wing is able to deal with, not the actual living, breathing reality (a.k.a. the woman). The fundamentalist right wingers are very invested in concepts like Soul and Spirit when it comes to the IDEA of preserving life, while at the same time are more than ready to shoot down that dirty nigger/Arab/fag etc. in their school/town/foreign country. Fundamentalists only know how to spew rhetoric about the concept of life. They don't actually have any real respect for it. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy to say that you are simulataneously pro-life and pro-war. Because they've reduced the idea of life to a concept, that's why they can issue blanket statements and laws about what's "best" for women regarding their own reproductive rights. That's why they can condescend to us, because after all, God is on their side.