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MSNBC interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Fifty Shades of Grey

Domestic violence counselors speak out against Fifty Shades of Grey

Troy Newman lies and lies about low-income women and abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Ian Millhiser will be on to talk about how the Obama administration is quietly wining court battles in favor of contraception. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has some important things to say about abortion rights and there’s nothing new about Fifty Shades of Grey.

Sad news. Lesley Gore died last week of lung cancer at age 68. She sang one of the great feminist anthems before second wave feminism was even really a thing, back in 1963.

• Gore *

Though she never really hid it, Gore came out publicly as a lesbian in 2005. She’s survived by her partner of 33 years.

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MSNBC’s Irin Carmon interviewed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently, and clips appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show. The entire interview, which is available in show links, is up at the MSNBC website. Ginsburg is an interesting person, as listeners are no doubt fully aware, because she had a long history prior to her career as a judge being a crusading lawyer for feminist causes. These days, she sits on a conservative court that’s hostile to women’s rights and so she is known primarily for her scathing dissents of their attempts to roll back the clock. Irin is writing a biography of Ginsburg, and so she was really able to focus on this long history and some of the big picture questions. The interview quickly turned to the subject of abortion rights and the question of exactly how much danger the current court presents to Roe v. Wade. Ginsburg’s outlook is bleak, but sadly likely quite accurate.

• Ginsburg 1 *

No one knows this better than anti-choicers. That’s why their strategies are all geared at targeting clinics on a geographic basis and passing laws requiring waiting periods and other obstacles that take, above all other things, money to overcome. It’s about making abortion access a luxury available only to those women who can afford to drop everything for a week to travel to get an abortion. So say, the goal is that for a woman in Dallas to be able to get an abortion, she should be able to have the money to fly to New York and stay there for a few days to get that done: Hotel, airfare, ability to take off work. Anti-choicers are not there yet, but they’re way closer to that goal, forcing women across the red states to have to travel hours for an abortion. It’s basically “abortion for me but not for thee” as a legislative strategy. And it works as a political strategy, too, because so much of the media thinks that as long as Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, abortion access is safe. But Ginsburg explained that it’s more complex than that.

• Ginsburg 2 *

And that’s really why the current anti-abortion legislation in Texas is so devastating. As Ginsburg says, the Supreme Court is unlikely to just overturn Roe v. Wade. But Justice John Roberts is a master at writing opinions that gut liberal decisions of the past without overturning them outright. For instance, he was able to gut Brown v. the Board of Education without overturning it by forcing schools that had voluntary desegregation programs to stop those programs. Perversely, he pulled the “colorblind” argument to justify his decision that upholds segregated school districts. So yeah, he’s an evil genius. And I suspect what will happen is that he will find that while there’s a technical right to an abortion, he’ll argue that as long as it’s legal somewhere in the U.S. it’s okay for states to use bogus regulations to restrict legal abortion out of existence.

Ginsburg had a really great analogy to illustrate how bad it could get.

• Ginsburg 3 *

This really gives you a good idea, I think, of what the end game here is, a situation like the past, where the only people who could get divorced were people who could drop everything and spend six weeks in Nevada to get one. To be clear, I think the people who engage in this kind of classist thinking aren’t necessarily cackling villains, though a few are. I think it’s just mindless prejudice. They think that they are perfectly capable of making a responsible decision about abortion, but believe that lower-income people are reckless and irresponsible and need to be controlled for their own good. You see that same mentality when you see conservatives push for marriage courses for low-income women or propose the just-get-married solution for single women living in poverty. They just assume that because you’re not rich, you’re not very bright and need some paternalistic wealthy figure telling you what to do. Of course, that mentality is super wrong and there’s scores of social science research debunking the idea that wealthy people are inherently better choice-makers than the rest of us, but the problem is that the people wed to this mentality don’t care to look at that kind of research.

All this is very sad, but there was a light joke about women’s rights in the interview, with Irin asked Justice Ginsburg to play a game where she asked for one-word responses to certain references. And got this.

• Ginsburg 4 *

Yes, it was wrong. I’m so glad she’s not afraid to say it.

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Interview

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If you have turned on your TV or the radio or flipped on the internet in the past month, you may have learned the shocking news that women have sexual fantasies. In fact, so much so that Hollywood has decided they make a lot of money off of them.

• Grey 1 *

For those who have been living under a rock, Fifty Shades of Grey is softcore, R-rated erotic movie aimed at primarily female audiences. It’s based on books that were based on Twilight fan fiction. The story is about a young college girl who is a virgin being seduced by an abusive older man who is a billionaire, and who stalks her, controls her, and forces sexual acts on her without her consent, all while she is secretly loving it on the inside. The movie downplays some of the worst aspects, but the basic idea is still there: Christian Grey is an abusive man who plays head games and engages in controlling behavior and stalking, but because she is submissive and loving, she turns him into the gentle, kind lover of her dreams. But there’s a lot of sexy BDSM along the way.

This movie is creating a lot of anger out there from a lot of corners. The Christian right, of course, objects to it because they believe women aren’t supposed to like sex, much less indulge sexual fantasies. BDSM enthusiasts also object, saying the book portrays BDSM practices incorrectly and unsafely, particularly by not showing that it’s supposed to be fully consensual. And feminists are angry because the movie romanticizes domestic violence.

• Grey 2 *

Look, let’s be real here. It’s absolutely true that one reason a lot of women get caught up in abusive relationships is that we are told, over and over again, that controlling and possessive behavior means a man just really loves you. And we are also fed the myth that abusive men are just broken souls who can be healed through the power of a woman’s love. Abusers themselves use the clichés to control their victims. For example, an abuser may hit a woman and then start crying and saying that he doesn’t mean it, but he’s just a sad soul who needs a woman’s tender, loving care. Many domestic violence victims report feeling like they had to comfort their abusers after an incident. Some are even made to feel they have to have sex with their abusers to make him feel better about what he did. It’s all messed up and it’s a dynamic that definitely is romanticized in Fifty Shades of Grey. However, I will point out that this is hardly the first time we’ve been told the story of the woman who heals abusive, controlling man through submissive love.

• Grey 3-7 *

Those were clips from, in order, Beauty and the Beast, My Fair Lady, The Taming of the Shrew, Twilight, and Pretty Woman. While there are some minor variations on the theme, the story is basically the same one, over and over: A powerful, often cruel and abusive man, takes control of the life of a woman much less powerful than he is, hiding her away from the world and remaking her into what he wants her to be. The woman fights at first, but eventually submits to his controlling ways, and her submission earns her “true love” and turns her beastly partner into a tender, loving mate.

That’s why I’m a bit troubled by all the attention Fifty Shades of Grey is getting. The only thing it does different than these other stories is it makes sex more central to the plot and involves kinky behavior. So yes, it’s good to criticize this book and movie for romanticizing abusive relationship patterns. But it would be better to do so while firmly rooting those criticisms in this historical pattern this story fits into, to show that the issues isn’t sex, but the long-standing and deplorable tradition of stories that tell women that you can turn an abuser into a pussycat with your love.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, proving Ruth Bader Ginsburg right edition. As noted in the first segment, Justice Ginsburg called out the war on legal abortion specifically as a class war, a way to make abortion and control over your own body a privilege of wealth instead of a human right. Troy Newman of Operation Rescue made some comments on American Family Radio that seem determined to prove her right. This is going to be quoted at length, because it really just captures so perfectly the misogyny, racism, classism, and hostility to facts that fuels the anti-choice movement.

• Newman *

How many ways is this wrong? You have him claiming Medicaid covers abortion, which it does not, by federal law. You have him claiming Obamacare has something to do with this, which it doesn’t. You have him claiming that the only expense associated with having a baby is the cost of a bottle of vitamins and a sonogram. You have him invoking “Obama phones,” which is this right wing myth that Obama bought off low-income voters with free cell phones—which is also not true. But beyond the lies, one shining truth comes through: Newman and his anti-choice comrades clearly hate poor women and want to punish and control them. That truth came across loud and clear.