Comment by whimsicalism
2 years ago
I am firmly in favor of abortion rights but still I do not think that is even remotely a good bellwether to measure sexism/misogyny.
1. Women are more likely than men to be opposed to abortion rights. 2. Many people who are opposed to abortion rights have legitimately held moral concerns that are not simply because they have no respect for women's rights. 3. Roe v. Wade was the decision of 9 people. It absolutely did not reflect public opinion at the time - nothing even close to as expansive would possibly have passed in a referendum in 1974. Compare that to now, where multiple states that are known abortion holdouts have repealed abortion restrictions in referenda - and it is obvious that people are moving to the left on this issue compared to where we were in 1974.
Social media facilitates communication. As long as there is sexism and freedom of communication, there will be people making money off of facilitating sexist communication because there will be people making money off of facilitating communication writ large. It's like blaming a toll highway for facilitating someone trafficking drugs. They are also making money off of facilitating anti-sexist communication - and the world as a whole is becoming less sexist, partially in my view due to the spread of views facilitated by the internet.
Right. We can see something similar with the Terry Schiavo case or the opposition to IFV right now. It's clear that this is about different opinions regarding what should be considered a living human being (which doesn't seem to have a very clean definition for anyone, it should be noted). Depending on where you draw the line, it's either horrible to outlaw abortions or horrible to allow them.
Framing it as simply taking away a woman's bodily autonomy is like framing circumcision as simply being about mutilating men.
> 2. Many people who are opposed to abortion rights have legitimately held moral concerns that are not simply because they have no respect for women's rights.
Then they are free to not get an abortion. I don't get an abortion every day, it's pretty easy to accomplish. They do not get to use the letter of law to interfere in other people's medical decisions and care, and they most definitely should not have the ability to use the letter of the law to get unhealthy women killed to suit their precious morals.
Like, genuinely, if you are near a woman who is having a serious medical condition where her baby is killing her, there is no, and I repeat, NO version of that where letting an adult, alive, otherwise viable person die in the hopes that the clump of cells killing her might make it. That does not make sense under any moral system at all. We don't even take organs from recently deceased people without their permission before they croak, and some people think they have the right to demand someone lay down their entire actual life in the hope a baby MIGHT be born and live? Fuck that. Stupid.
> 3. Roe v. Wade was the decision of 9 people.
Sod public opinion. The public is wrong all the goddamn time. One would argue they're wrong more often than they aren't, and the more of em there are, and the louder they are, the more likely they're fucking wrong.
> Social media facilitates communication. As long as there is sexism and freedom of communication, there will be people making money off of facilitating sexist communication because there will be people making money off of facilitating communication writ large.
This is such a defeatist attitude. There will also always be revenge porn, child abuse material, beheading videos and people putting monkeys in blenders. Do we allow that everywhere too then? Since we cannot guarantee total blackout on objectionable content, we just wild west it? Fucking nonsense. We decide constantly by way of moderation on every service and website that exists what is permitted, and what is not, and there is no reason at all that those same things cannot be enshrined in law, with steep penalties for services that fuck up and host it.
it appears you want to debate the abortion issue on the merits when i’ve already said i agree with you. my point about public opinion was only in reference to public opinion being a gauge of general sexist attitudes and the degree to which being anti-abortion is intrinsically out of sexist motivations vs other differing beliefs.
on your second point, much of the material you’re describing is actively illegal - which is a different case. i agree with your point around moderation but feel conflicted with my intuition that the rules impacting speech should generally be publicly known and generally expansive. i am not sure what the reconciliation is. but i also don’t really know who andrew tate is, so can only really speak in the abstract
Agreed it is a poor bell whether.
But:
> Women are more likely than men to be opposed to abortion rights
Where is that coming from? Pew (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...) has a 5 point higher opposition rate by men.
Generally it seems from polls I had seen that the % of women favoring illegality is higher than men [0][1]. But it seems that there has been a considerable shift in women's opinions post-pandemic which perhaps tracks in the US with broader gender partisan shifts (men & women becoming politically delinked, perhaps due to algo social media/tiktok) as well as Dobbs being a wakeup call for some women.
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.a... [1]: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... (older but it was a poll i remembered)
Your second poll is from the UK. :)
Interesting find on Gallup. My read is that the genders are broadly similar, but women have more variance/more nuanced opinions, presumably from thinking about this more.
Yglesias has a good overview: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...