Thursday, October 18, 2007 - Posts
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The early reviews of XX Factor are in, and they’re ambivalent, to put it nicely. The complaint is mostly the concept. At Tapped, Dana Goldstein is "discouraged that another mainstream publication has put its feminist blogging in a separate space." At Huffington Post, Jessica Wakeman writes, "I still wish for the day when women-on-politics blogs don't exist anymore." Here’s a meaner take from Gawker.
I don’t really wish for the end of women-only spaces to discuss politics, or culture, or current events (the "etc" in our tag line is supposed to stand for all of that). I like those conversations. I work in a mostly male office (Slate DC, that is, not Slate as a whole). I like that space, too. I also like to read legal blogs. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of content or discussion belongs where.
My basic defense of a women’s blog is this: A bunch of smart women mulling over various issues that interest us together—what's wrong with that? We started the blog in part because we thought women might be more likely to read women writing about politics. I don’t think women-only conversations somehow hold back the larger project of integrating women into other discussions. If anything, it might embolden them.
Some of our (also smart critics) object to the personal element in our posts. That’s one kind of blogging gestalt—there are plenty of male bloggers who inject the same informal note. Nor does XX mean that any of us will stop writing longer, less off-the-cuff commentary. Yes, as Jessica W. says, it should be a given for the media to be filled with smart women writing about politics and everything else. We’re all part of that Slate-wide, whoever-wide conversation. Now we’re having this one, too. Hey, we’re multitaskers: We can try on different hats.
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Soon after reading Amanda’s post on Susan Orr’s appointment to head the Office of Population Affairs—the office in the Health and Human Services Department that oversees family planning—I read that the school board in Portland, Maine, has—by an astounding (to me) 10-2 vote—decided to allow middle-students to get prescription birth control without parental notification.
Putting the two stories alongside each other demonstrates what a disheartening divide we still have on the topic of birth control, without even bringing up abortion. I might be the only person writing here who wishes abortion weren’t legal, but I’m a pragmatic pro-lifer: Birth control is a wonderful thing. Condoms, the pill, sponges—the more, the better. It’s beyond ridiculous to tell women that they shouldn’t have abortions and then oppose any means by which they can prevent pregnancy.
At least, I like to think I’m pragmatic on this issue. But when I read that people want to put 12-year-old girls on the pill and not notify parents, I’m horrified. Sure, you can throw up your hands and say, “They’re having sex anyway. Shouldn’t we do what we can?” But once you do that, where do you draw the line? Is there even a line left to draw? William Saletan had an interesting piece a few weeks ago that discussed how difficult it is to come up with an appropriate “age of consent.” One line from that piece (and I’m not trying to take Will out of context—his article dealt largely with statutory rape) seems relevant to this discussion: “Consent implies competence, and 12-year-olds don't really have that.”
I know the statistics show that offering birth control to teenagers doesn’t increase sexual activity. But so many people—parents, educators, volunteers—are working hard to help girls create build self-esteem and create the positive self-images that encourage them to say no to sex. Measures like this one seem to undercut those efforts. And isn’t one of the problems with education today that parents aren’t involved enough? By removing the parents from the equation here, you’re not doing anything to foster the strong family relationships that our children need.
(As an aside, I also find it odd that some schools have such a zero-tolerance policy for drugs that they will suspend a girl for taking a Motrin for PMS; yet in other places schools will help girls get the pill.)
After all that, I guess my question is this: Will we ever reach a middle ground, where we can agree that it’s stupid to say “abstinence rules,” yet still think it’s a pretty damn bad idea to give 12-year-olds the pill behind their parents’ back?
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