Post 4- Policing Women's Bodies

Women and their right to control their bodies are under attack in America. There is evidence all around us, from Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation onto the Supreme Court, to the dismantling of abortion clinics across the country. The President is an admitted perpetrator of sexual violence, and is trying to strip trans people of their basic human rights. Planned Parenthood is being more and more widely criticized by politicians who seek to strip women of not just access to a safe abortion, but several other essential health services, some of which are potentially life-saving. The government that is seeking to do these things is made up of mostly white men. Women make up less than 20% of officials in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, while they make up more than half of the population of the country. I’m linking a website here where you can look more deeply into exactly who Congress is made of.  It is nothing new, though, for the fate of women in this country to be held in the hands of a small group of white men. In Gloria Steinem’s piece, “Sex, Lies & Advertising,” she tells us how the last hope of the feminist magazine Ms. was left largely to the will of one man. “Indeed, as the scion of a family-owned company whose ad practices are followed by the beauty industry, he is one of the few men who could liberate many pages in all women's magazines just by changing his mind about "complementary copy,’” (6).

A horrifying but relevant political cartoon

With the fight in Washington growing stronger against Planned Parenthood, the idea of women needing to live without birth control, or go to extreme means to get it, is starting to look less like a far off dystopian hell and more like a plausible future. Roxanne Gay in her article The Alienable Rights of Women, even expresses her thoughts about setting up a sort of Underground Railroad for birth control and reproductive health services in case of the government’s refusal to provide these things. She brainstorms, “We could stockpile various methods of birth control and information about where women might go for safe, ethical reproductive healthcare in every state—contraception, abortion, education, all of it. We could create a network of reproductive healthcare providers and abortionists who would treat women humanely because the government does not and we could make sure that every woman who needed to make a choice had all the help she needed.” I had to let this sink in for a moment after I read it. A woman is thinking concretely and seriously about the possibility of providing illegal health care to women because the government could potentially refuse to do so. Shutting down Planned Parenthood would take away so much more than the deserved right to an abortion. On the Planned Parenthood website, we can see that abortion services are only two out of twelve that the organization offers.

Ieshia Evans, Black Lives Matter Protest in Baton Rouge

African American women and women of color are under even greater strain from the weight of Uncle Sam on top of them. Melissa Harris-Perry puts forth the idea in her Sister Citizen, “As members of a stigmatized group, African American women lack opportunities for accurate, affirming recognition of the self and yet must contend with hyper visibility imposed by their lower social status,” (39). With her theory of the Crooked Room, where African American women are given an uneven ground to live their life on, it is obviously remarkably more difficult to manage to get a grasp on how they should move forward on the tilted floor that throws them off with every step. Although Bell Hooks said that the black female gaze is a powerful weapon of rebellion, perhaps the current political climate calls for a little more engagement.

Media can both help and hurt women’s ideas about their bodies. Advertisements are one of the biggest negative influences on girls’ and women’s self-esteem, and there is no way to avoid that. Not only do models consistently have unachievable bodies for most women, but they are also digitally retouched, removing the image from reality completely. This doesn’t stop us from internalizing these expectations though. By showing absolutely impossible body types to girls and women of all ages, “they get the message that this is possible, that, with enough effort and self-sacrifice, they can achieve this ideal. Thus many girls spend enormous amounts of time and energy attempting to achieve something that is not only trivial but also completely unattainable,” (Kilbourne, 132).

On the other hand, media has provided us with an easy platform with which to reach out to each other and create support groups. The Me Too Movement took its first steps on social media, and this movement is an example of women taking the right to their body back from the men who thought it belonged to them.