Who's tired of Pink? Erica Jong is in a big snit

I see. And for a more sophisticated post-first year analysis of gender bias in our culture, where would you suggest folks turn? Is there a contemporary writer on the subject you might recommend or have we now moved past any necessary study of the matter because gender issues are resolved with women now on par with men in all/most sectors?

Barack Hearts Ronnie: An Old, New Song
Barack Hearts Ronnie: An Old, New Song
by Erica Jong
Posted January 18, 2008

I've already said I'll work for the Democrat who gets the majority of delegates -- whether Hillary, Barack, Edwards or Kucinich. But if Barack is such a breath of fresh air, why is he raving about Ronald Reagan?

Reagan -- the Hollywood red-baiter who rose from president of the Screen Actors Guild to president of the United States even though he was already senile. Reagan who gave us tax cuts and "trickle down" economics that didn't work -- except for the rich and richer and richest. Reagan who let "mommy" (Nancy) run the white house with the aid of her astrologer. Reagan whose horse was smarter than he was.

Give me a break. One of the most disgusting sights in recent years was the genuflecting before this total fraud that went on at his funeral. And the hypocritical bullshit being trumpeted by the networks! Where were all the actors and writers and directors whose lives he ruined? I guess they were dead. But -- what, me worry? -- in America nobody knows one crumb of history, so Ronald Reagan's vicious red baiting, how he rose to prominence by smearing other actors and writers and directors, was totally forgotten.

I suppose Mr. Obama has forgotten too--scholar of history that he is. Perhaps he was not alive in the 50s so he knows nothing about it -- the Army-McCarthy hearings, the smearing of creative artists who donated to Spanish Civil War Relief even though they were not "card-carrying" communists. They happened, like my parents, and their friends, to have given money to help little Spanish children, orphaned by the Spanish Civil War -- and ever after they trembled lest Ronnie Reagan and his ilk witch-hunt them.

What charity have you given to that some future McCarthy might call a "commie front"? What charity have you supported that some future Ronnie Reagan might out you for, claiming you were a disloyal American? Doctors without Borders? Is it a leftist sham? Or, since we don't have commies any more, is it non-patriotic because it started in France and before Sarko "the French were, cheese eating surrender monkeys"?

Remember "Freedom Fries" you guys?

So Mr. Obama is not such a new style politician after all. He's just a politician -- invoking Ronnie Reagan as if he were God Almighty, using his name as code as the Repugnicans do, trying to pump himself up as a man of the people by mentioning this total fraud as a hero.

I don't mind. Politicians are politicians and they do their thing -- praising the popular, putting down the unpopular -- invoking Reagan for his geniality -- which was probably just dementia. But Americans don't remember the past -- so we are doomed to repeat it.

I want a president who is not a politician and not a hypocrite -- but I don't see such a candidate around.

They all pander -- except Kucinich -- but he probably panders too and I just don't know it because of the thin coverage in the so-called mainstream media.

Barack, I'll vote for you if you get the nomination. And I'll work for you, too. I'll talk to my right wing neighbors in south- eastern Connecticut where I have voted democratic for three decades -- (a very short line).

My neighbors vote for Representative Christopher Shays who we vainly tried to replace with Democratic/feminist/anti-war Diane Farrell, and Senator Joe Lieberman, who is not good for the Jews. And who is certainly not a Democrat. Nor anti-war, nor anything really but a cynical politician. So are they all. Who else runs the gauntlet of a punishing campaign?

My Connecticut neighbors may still think the GOP will protect them from radical Islam. They may still hope the GOP will get rid of inheritance tax. They love their tax cuts more than they love their planet. They love their children, but they'd rather leave them money -- because, hey, in America, money is all we have to keep the wolf from the door.

I will talk to them about greening the planet (for real not just oil company PR) and about the little children maimed and killed in Iraq and about who's really protecting America rather than just doing photo ops. I will try my hardest for the democratic nominee even though many of my neighbors have never voted democratic in their lives.

But let's get real: every politician raises money and every politician (including Barack Obama) wants to get elected more than he wants to tell the whole truth. A pure, new politician? I don't think so. The Ronnie Reagan reference gives him away. He knows the election will be a popularity contest in benighted America, and he's not giving up anything he thinks might get him into the pop-u-lar people clique.

He's running for president of the High School G.O. They all are. Let's not romanticize any of them --bnnot dead red-baiter Ronnie Reagan, nor almost-dead former POW McCain, nor hard-working feminist Hillary who failed to leave Bill because she loved him and she knew she'd never find another man as clever (and smart women like smart men -- even if they are sex addicts), nor rich-lawyer-populist John Edwards, nor handsome Harvard man Barack with his perfect white/black background and his adorable girls.

Hey --i f you want a non-politician, folks, you can't vote for anyone. And that's not a good idea either.

Christ, Jong is an idiot. She completely missed the point of Obama's reference.

Cycloptichorn

Perhaps. On the flip side, she may have identified the danger of the reference.

What, that people who don't bother to analyze the situation misunderstand what he meant?

Cycloptichorn

Absolutely.

Most voters don't 'analyze', and those that do don't necessarily reach the expected conclusion.

True, but 'most voters' don't have the negative opinion of Reagan that many politicos do. History has painted him better then he deserves.

Cycloptichorn

Well, good luck to Mr. Obama for seeing what will stick.

Really, I don't think any of this **** will stick to him or anyone else. We are really narrowing in and focusing on little details that the vast majority of voters couldn't care less about.

Cycloptichorn

QFT

I would have no suggestions-- they'd have to figure it out on their own. Why are you getting your panites all bunched up?

She's all over the place and stuck in her era at the same time.

A knee jerk reaction. I guess that's what happens when you're famous and have already said your most interesting things years ago but you're on deadline...

If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would be a Sacrament
If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would be a Sacrament
by Erica Jong
Posted January 21, 2008 | 10:54 AM (EST)

Thirty five years ago (22 January 1973) the Supreme Court decided a case titled Roe v. Wade which held that until a fetus is viable outside its mother's body (twenty eight weeks), it is not a legal individual whose rights extend beyond the rights of its mother, that in fact the mother's health preempts any rights the partially formed embryo has.

This case overturned a law in Texas that criminalized abortion and reverberated through the states. According to the Roe decision, laws against abortion violated a woman's right to privacy under due process (in the Fourteenth Amendment). This decision superceded state laws restricting abortion.

Roe v. Wade is one of the most controversial cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. Even before it was decided there were men and women whose stomachs turned at the idea of abortion. The issue had been argued many times before in fairly recent history. In 18th century England, mothers accused of murder were not put to death if they could prove they were "with child." In infamous London prisons of the day there were "child-getters"--fertile men who could reliably make a woman pregnant. Some female criminals availed themselves of their services repeatedly so as not to be hanged.

In the early Soviet Union, abortion was freely available. It was later abolished because too many women were using it in place of birth control--which was hard for most women to get up until the sixties and seventies. Rich women had it, but often not the working classes. Remember Mary McCarthy's The Group? Vassar girls had diaphragms in the thirties--but not blue collar women who relied on condoms and men who would wear them or withdraw before ejaculation. As a seventeen-year-old freshman at Barnard, I got my first diaphragm from Planned Parenthood (a college tradition). I never got pregnant accidentally because I knew that an abortion would make me terribly sad. I loved children, dogs, cats and other living things, and I understood that terminating a pregnancy would be extremely hard for me emotionally. (But then I had sophisticated New York gynecologists all my life and grew up in liberal, enlightened Manhattan with parents who were bohemians of the thirties before they surprised themselves by getting rich).

In my own Manhattan high school years, girls disappeared from New York to darkest New Jersey or Pennsylvania to seek the services of illegal abortionists and many of them were accidentally sterilized while others may have died. Rich women in New York went to Flower Fifth Avenue hospital for a "D & C." My mother did this as late as 1960, but our housekeepers and baby nurses from Jamaica or the Deep South didn't have that option. A safe medical abortion (my mother referred to it in whispers as an "a- b") was expensive and hard to find. Many poor women got infected and died. In my mother's case, as I later learned, my father was adamant about not having another baby. There were already three girls growing up and needing private schools, hand-smocked party dresses, music lessons, art lessons, ballet, figure skating, charge accounts at Saks, Best and Company and Bergdorf's, Doubleday book stores (with their listening booths for LPS--which we quaintly called "records."

How interesting that the thirty-fifth anniversary of Roe comes on the very day that my daughter will go home from the hospital after having had twins. She had a really tough time, and has been warned that she would be at risk if she got pregnant again. She is not yet thirty and has had, thank the goddess, three beautiful children and a lovely husband. She also has generous parents and in-laws, step-parents who adore her and can refuse her nothing. But she was still terrified by a very difficult delivery (the details of which are hers not mine to describe. Since she is a much-published novelist, I'm sure she will).

The babies, a girl and a boy, are miraculous--like all babies--bringing back to me Ordinary Miracles, a book of poems about childbirth I wrote when Molly was born. (The phrase has entered the language--or been ripped off by various ASCAPniks and jingle writers). Babies are miraculous, especially just when they just wake to the world.

They seem to come from a better place which some call 'God,' some call 'Mother Nature,' and some call human evolution, depending on your point of view. (I happen to think that evolution is every bit as numinous as 'God'). But one thing is clear: Having them ain't easy. And that's long before you have to raise them.

For centuries, death in childbirth was woman's lot. In some places, it still is. In mountainous Afghanistan where women can't get to hospitals or there are none, in war zones, in occupied zones with barriers or curfews, in many parts of Africa, in rural India, and China, in rural America, giving birth is still no joke. Even in big cities, it can be dangerous. There is massive bleeding, the placentas don't always detach promptly, babies are often transverse or breach, just for starters. Then there is the question of medical care.

Again, in the eighteenth-century, my favorite period in English Literature, (at the dawn of the modern era--but before Louis Pasteur), accoucheurs (the precursors of obstetricians) killed many women with the microbes they unknowingly carried from the sickbeds of other patients. There was a great political struggle between midwives, who only dealt with women, and doctors who treated everyone, because the doctors wanted their monopoly.

Many women died of infection--like Charlotte Bronte--or nearly died like Mary Shelley. Women's health had always been a political football in the supposedly "civilized" Christian era. Many midwives (always specialists in women's health) were burned as witches throughout modern history.

Now we know about bacteria and viruses and we are much more aware of unconscious infection, but childbirth can still be a big deal--especially for older women, very young women, the ill, the malnourished, the poor, the mothers of multiple babies. It seems to me incredible that anyone without a uterus would try to dictate what a woman should do with hers.

So I am appalled that abortion remains under attack--and that birth control in America has been impeded. We came so far with so much struggle. To give it back now is no less than an assault on women's health.

Of course babies are precious and should be cherished. Nobody doubts that. But should a woman be forced by the law to give birth if she has health issues, a dead baby, twins or triplets, or can't get to a hospital or must be accompanied but a male relative--who may be at war or dead or unwilling? Fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalist Christians would deny her that.

No wonder the late great Florynce Kennedy said: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."