The General P&R Women's Thread

Politics and religion
1

[formerly Le Deuxième Sexe!]

I wanted to make a thread for all women related content outside of metoo. Most of it is going to be horrible, because that’s today, and for some reason it’s women’s issues that drives the world mad.

So apparently some guy named Kevin Williamson was hired by The Atlantic recently as some kind of, as Paul Krugman put it, “Conservative Unicorn”, an earnest and thoughtful conservative that actually exists.

Well, alas, unicorns are indeed hard to find.

Turns out he advocated the death penalty for women having abortions in a podcast in 2014. He also fantasized about hanging as a great way to make people suffer when being executed. To be fair, i guess, he didn’t outright say “i want to hang women who have abortions and make them suffer”.

I would totally go with treating (abortion) like any other crime up to and including hanging — which kind of, as I said, I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment. I tend to think that things like lethal injection are a little too antiseptic.

… but he is fantasizing about making people suffer whom he executes when thinking about women receiving the death penalty for abortion.

Needless to say women were appalled, and The Atlantic withdrew it’s offer of employment.

What’s strange about this, and why i posted it, is how much conservative support he’s receiving, and how this is leading to an equally vehement backlash by women seeing conservatives circle the wagons around someone who advocates the death penalty for abortion and then fantasies about how they’d do it. Suddenly “lie-beral media” is censoring thoughtful conservatives and ect ect.

The stark and terrifying reality that, underneath it all, many conservatives are indeed comfortable with women receiving the death penalty for abortion and that this, as a respectable position, has suddenly the chance to become mainstream.

2

The weirdest defenses I’ve seen made for Kevin Williamson – and by folks who are at least non-stupid enough to write for NRO and places of that ilk – is that he was clearly joking or said what he didn’t intend to say, or his remarks were somehow contextual.

But here’s the thing: Williamson hasn’t said this on one occasion and then “Oh shit, hey…” No, he’s said this on multiple occasions after – as the OP notes – clearly considered thought over it. This is not a matter of someone saying something outrageous an stepping over a line and before he realized it. This is clearly someone who has thought about stepping over that line, and decided to do it and decided to do it again and again and again.

So yeah. That’s his free speech rights in action. And that’s also the rights of others to use their free speech to call this douchebag slug out and cost him a job.

3

You could have gone one further with the French thread title. Women were traditionally referred to not as the second or fairer sex but as “le sexe faible”.

I.e. the weaker sex. I’ve read that way to designate women originally related to the story of the garden of Eden but have no clue whether that’s true.

But that would be something you would hear daily and without conscious malice in my childhood and beyond.

4

Something something Kipling. Something something Female of the Species…

5

It’s a reference to Simone de Beauvoir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex

It’s a dated phrase, true, and Second Wave feminism is probably dated as well. What pushed me to choose it after some reflection was curb appeal rather than some ideological alignment. But i’d be happy to change it!

6

If you want people to know what the thread is about, I’d at the very least subtitle it for the plebs (e.g. me).

7

“She looks like Eva Marie-Saint
In “On The Waterfront”
She reads Simone de Beauvoir
In her American circumstance…”

8

I’m not going to defend this garbage, but this one point here I’ll argue that the notion of capital punishment being “too antiseptic” could be interpreted as meaning that making execution less graphic might allow people to ignore what is actually happening.

If some dude is hanged, you are under no illusion that he just went to sleep. That dude just died in front of you.

On some level, exposing people to the full impact of their choices and what they really mean gives them more information to make choices. Like, folks should probably see a cow get slaughtered at some point, to inform their decision of whether they want to eat meat. (I have seen a cow slaughtered, and I still eat meat, by the way.)

9

I just aborted a cheeseburger and a double order of fries, I tell ya what.

10

Ok fine here’s your boring titles!

11

That’s the argument for bringing back the guillotine i’ve read - not to mention it’s probably more humane than the drugs they use today. I mean lethal injection vs guillotine… i’d have to choose the later.

12

You may want to reconsider

13

Holy shit. Your head can live for 4 to 30 seconds after you die? No thanks.

14

I feel like you’re gonna lose consciousness way faster.

All the blood is going to drain out of it almost immediately. It’s not like holding your breath, either, because it’s not like you’d have the current body’s oxygen supply. You’d have NO oxygen in your brain, other than the small amount of blood actually in your brain at the time… but even less than if you were getting choked out, since the current blood supply would all drain out.

I can’t see how you’d stay conscious for more than a few seconds, tops.

15

I’d still way way prefer it to the foaming at the mouth horribleness “lethal injection” can be.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/lethal-injection/

People act like the “shock” won’t kill you. People and animals die all the time from the “shock” effect of bullets. Getting your head lopped off is kinda up there in severity of shock. Even if you’re brain is still around for a few seconds you’re going to be so shocked it won’t matter.

16

So nobody told us at first but it turns out the pilot aboard SWA Flight 1380 was a female Navy Veteran. Pretty cool.

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The Navy may be known for boats, but they know how to fly.

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… and the Irish abortion referendum passed.

20

No word if non-binaries meet the requirements.