Saturday, June 11, 2022

11: Abortion, Jack Dorsey, Ukraine

Sex, Abortion and Feminism, as Seen From the Right The socially conservative legal scholar Erika Bachiochi argues that abortion rights have stalled women’s progress toward equality. ........ For years, social conservatives provided the G.O.P. its votes and its shock troops. But the economic conservatives got all the policy. Republicans would win by mobilizing evangelicals and then use that power to pass corporate tax cuts............ an inflection point. The multidecade effort to stack the Supreme Court with hardcore social conservatives is paying off. Roe looks like it’s going to be overturned. ......... that Republican politicians of recent years put markets first and families and churches and communities last. And the result has been social disintegration and cultural chaos. .......... If Roe is indeed overturned, the Republican Party in general and social conservatives in particular are going to be the dogs that caught the car. .......... Most Americans don’t want abortion banned. ......... Erika Bachiochi.......... in her 2021 book “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision,” she tries to build a structure, a philosophical structure, going back to older thinkers, for a socially conservative feminism, one that embraces women’s gains in professional and civic life but holds that abortion and technological forms of contraception and the sexual revolution were devastating for women’s well-being and the cultivation of virtue and duty. ........... Her view is that abortion and contraception — and you’ll hear this — really serve the needs of capital at the expense of families. And with Roe gone, Bachiochi believes that a truly pro-family conservatism and even country can flourish. ......... I tell the story of the cause of women’s rights through the lens of sexual and reproductive asymmetry. I think for a long time in the 1980s — and then still you hear this in different circles, that the real question of feminism is, are women and men the same, or are women and men different? ......... the question of sexual and reproductive asymmetry, the fact that men and women engage in the same sexual act in heterosexual sex but that women can get pregnant and men cannot, is really the one that all feminists are responding to in their different kind of ways. ........ And so we tend to, I think, see the modern day women’s movement really capitulate to a market logic, where equality is seen in market terms, a market equality, where instead of this women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, both men and women are valued only as breadwinners. .......... work of care they do in the home, has not been valued in the market and by our public institutions. And that has been especially, I think, difficult for poor women. .........

a profound problem in our society is that we don’t value care work

......... you’re drawing a fairly deep connection between the rise of contraception, abortion rights, and Roe particularly, the change in our sexual culture, the rise of single parenthood to that devaluing or lack of valuing of care work. ......... contraception and abortion create this dominance of market logic, this devaluing of the family and — I think you’re making this claim — lead women to be worse off. ........... casual sex culture has become sort of the default. And I think that tends to be better for a male sexuality. .......... it’s not to say that there aren’t alpha women who like sex on the first date or the first meeting. But all sorts of data shows us that women tend to prefer sex and actually enjoy sex much more in commitment. ........... The abortion-backed contraceptive revolution has allowed men especially to basically — gives them more reason to walk away from unexpected pregnancy. ........... that’s led to a feminization of poverty. ........... sexual economics ............

single motherhood is the single greatest predictor of poverty in our country

.......... we can point to all sorts of ways in which our current economy and economic transitions have harmed men and made them incapable of being there ............ disconnecting and decoupling sex from marriage and marriage from childbearing is pretty devastating for the poor. ............. the way sex, as thought about today, is very much self-expression, is very much pleasure in mind. And I think, again, there are pretty dangerous asymmetries for women there. Because when you decouple sex from marriage and from childbearing and pleasure is left to be the only marker, that it tends to be far better for men. .......... as it turns out, for women, sex is far more pleasurable in commitment. And why in commitment? Because for sex to be pleasurable for women, there needs to be kind of a vulnerability, where a woman is relaxed enough to enjoy sex. ......... some data about the real orgasm gap that you see in the casual sex culture today ........ a real marker of the decline of good sex, both in the sense of pleasurable sex but also what she calls good or ethical sex, which I think that there’s more sex within marriage, and I think women enjoy sex better in marriage when they can be more vulnerable. .......... freeing women to have sex just like men, which is basically what the pill and abortion do, I think also hasn’t been good for women .......... men have blasts of testosterone beating through them in a way that’s different from — it’s distinguished from women. And that does tend to lend to greater sexual desire and sexual aggression, especially sex that is quicker and easier, quicker release. It’s a different kind of sex than women want. ........ you see in the sexual economic work — that the pill kind of inspires this change in sexual behavior so that there’s more sexual risk-taking both inside and outside of marriage. .......... how the early American women’s rights advocates thought about this, because I think many people now know that they were opposed to abortion. ...........

they really were worried about these threats of undisciplined male sexual desire.

.......... you can bring, I think, women down to men’s standards, which is freewheeling quick sex. Or you can bring men up to women’s standards, which is actually what these women were hoping for ........ it sounds a lot like our desire not to have forced motherhood, which is a real kind of pro-choice slogan. ......... there should be abstinence during the fertile period. ........ You see all sorts of young women, actually — I hear they’re on TikTok being angry about contraception and really being interested, more interested in natural fertility regulation. ........ We want organic food. We want to take care of our bodies in all sorts of ways. And yet here we are consuming vast quantities of hormones to regulate our cycles. ............ it demands abstinence of men during certain times, that it is getting them to be more aware in their bodies just as women are every month because of menses of really the connection between sex and potential parenthood. ......... there are all sorts of signs of fertility that a woman’s body, I guess you could say, emits, things like cervical fluid, rises and falls in temperature, that indicate to the woman how fertile she is and when she could get pregnant. .......... one version is we should have the sexual ideal that is more restrained, more disciplined, more held back than what we currently have. But law — and a lot of this book is about law, and a lot of your advocacy is about law. Law is very much about what happens when things go wrong, when you have sex and maybe you wish you hadn’t, or the form of contraception you were using fails. ......... my understanding of the data is that about a quarter of people who try natural contraception of the kind you’re describing will get pregnant in the first year. ........ the best methods rival the birth control pill, are 1 percent — I mean, the birth control pill also requires a certain discipline, that you take it every day. .......... generally easy access to abortion actually tends to disincentivize contraceptive use. ....... the typical abortion patient. And it found that they have children. They’re poor. They’re unmarried. They’re in their late 20s. They have some college education. And they’re very early in pregnancy. That’s the modal person who gets an abortion. ........... I don’t know that women today, with the state of how women think in terms of that they owe men sex at having a beer, a cup of coffee, or something — that the cost of sex is so low right now that I’m not sure that I can convince women that it would be so much better for them, for their relationships, for their enjoyment of sex to go out and learn natural fertility regulation. ..........

natural fertility regulation is better for women than contraception

.......... this has been bad for women, for their emotions, for all sorts of things. ........ it takes the attention off the real structural problems in the lives of the poor, whether it’s substandard health conditions, whether it’s poor housing, whether it’s neglectful or absent fathers or the fact that their fathers can’t get work and so can’t pay child support. .......... we’re putting poor women in a situation where the best we can get, the richest country in the history of the world, is to offer them the means to have abortions. .......... these choice-based arguments basically strengthen the kind of impulse of our very libertarian culture and politics to leave women with the consequences of the bargain, basically, the consequences of her having gotten pregnant. ........... the way in which we treat pregnant women in the workplace culture, massive pregnancy discrimination still, the kind of workplace conditions that especially poor women have, where they have to return to work. Many women have to return to work within like two weeks or less of giving birth. ......... you have employers, corporations, you have states talking about the corporate case for reproductive health — is that it’s a far cheaper option than accommodations for pregnancy, accommodations for caregiving. And so when they’re thinking about the bottom line, this is the way they’re going to go. ........... neither the red states or the blue states are doing a good job at this ........ because it’s much harder to have a child than walk into an abortion clinic, it becomes an easier choice for that person, one which potentially a woman then suffers regrets from. ........... have abortion restrictions and have these pro-family policies. ............ that’s the work of the pro-life movement going forward. ........ many people end up regretting abortion ....... five years on, 99% of women, 99% who had the abortion said it was the right decision for them. And they were better off on a range of other health and economic outcomes. ......... for those women who were actually denied an abortion, only one week after seeking an abortion but then being denied it, 35 percent of those women no longer wished they could have aborted. .......... the child — well, they don’t call the child — the fetus is like a trespasser on their property of their body, the self-ownership of their body, again, in a very Lockean way — and they then have this right to dispel anyone who comes through it in kind of an absolute property right ........... the child, who is a human being and is really utterly dependent on his or her mother at that time for those nine months, is the most vulnerable and the most dependent. ..........

I don’t understand why it is that we could not think that there are two human beings here.

.......... a fetus at 10 weeks is different than someone at 30 weeks and doesn’t think there’s any easy way to draw the line .......... the choices people actually have to make are agonizing, and they agonize over them. And we should trust often that they know better than we do. .......... there are many women who have difficult or dangerous pregnancies. Most don’t. Most pregnancies aren’t dangerous and are natural experiences of bringing human life into the world. ........ The child who is conceived in rape has the same equal dignity, and therefore, the same sort of duties of care are owed. ........ abortion is actually kind of a second violent act against the pregnant woman. ......... somewhat unresolvable moral and philosophical and religious intuitions. ............ abortion has led to a feminization of poverty .......... marriage and having children inside a marriage has become a very important and profound class marker .......... a child’s life is taken in an abortion and that we actually owe duties to that child, that it helps reset thinking about sex itself, that I think it ought to help us take sex more seriously. .......... And that itself may empower women — I hope it would empower women — to kind of take their place again as gatekeepers of sex. And that is to expect more from men when they engage in sex, to expect commitment. Because if they do wait, if they are able to put off men and to expect more from them, to expect a greater maturity, to expect them to hold down a job, to expect them to get off their computers and get off porn and all sorts of things, that I think there could be a real maturation of men that is required. ............... and then, as the economists say, raise the cost of sex. ....... How opioids have been treated versus how crack was treated is very, very, very telling. .......... European countries have lower marriage rates than we do. And there is a lot of evidence, I think, at this point that pretty unchecked capitalism and a lot of inequality is a real driver of family breakdown in poor communities. ........... massive incarceration is a massive problem because of the way in which it pulls fathers away from their children. To me, it seems like it’s not just the poor who need self-discipline. It’s all of us who need self-discipline. ........... our equal human capacity for moral development. .......... there’s this kind of new antinatalism, this new people deciding ex ante that they never want to become parents. .......... for eons and eons, what human beings have seen is that becoming a mother or father really develops the person, requires a great movement away from the focus on self toward another .......... the kind of quest for autonomy tends to leaves people really empty, tends to leave people literally alone.

We have a loneliness epidemic.

the family is not parasitic on the market. The market is parasitic on the family. .......... policies that prioritize what she said was the family claim over the social claim. .......... now that you mentioned I was a Bernie supporter. But I was studying sociology, women’s studies, and then moved toward political theory in college. ............ a responsive community must act to smooth the path for parents so that the joys of family life might be more easily felt and its burdens more fairly borne. ......... the caring for children and the work of the home is something that all of society benefits from. ............ the idea of spreading costs of child rearing more fully across societies is, I think, a just kind of thing. And so thinking of the market as something that serves families and not just that families serve the market I think is a good way to think about it. .......... workplace flexibility is a really, really important one and predictable scheduling. ........ upper echelons of workers have this knit into their work and that those who are low-wage workers really — it’s the just-in-time scheduling, where they’re given their schedules barely a week ahead of time and have all sorts of difficult childcare predicaments ............. there should really just be a lot more workplace flexibility just as a humane kind of standard. ......... parents really should not be economically disadvantaged by raising children. .......... a man on the moon with government priorities. Why aren’t we prioritizing the really important work that takes place in the home? And so those are some of the basic things that I would say. .......... my time as a women’s studies student at Middlebury College



Jack Dorsey announces ‘Web 5’, a new platform built on Bitcoin blockchain Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). ....... Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). The platform brings decentralized identity and data storage to applications. “It lets developers focus on creating delightful user experiences while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals,” according to the company. ........ To the Twitter co-founder, Web 3 isn’t truly “decentralized” or owned by its users, but instead by various venture capitalists and limited partners ........ this web platform is built to provide two core use cases: individuals will have the ability to “own their data”, and they will be able to “control their identity”. These use cases will be supported by wallets, decentralized web nodes (DWNS), and decentralized web apps (DWAS). .......... “there are no tokens to invest in with web5.”

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