A Poulos Placeholder Post
I have some still fermenting thoughts and questions about James Poulos recent and apparently inflammatory post What are Women For?, not the least of which is whether or not to post the blind link to a complete version of Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl on YouTube. (I’ve already decided that embedding it in a post at the League is too provocative.)
For now, a placeholder in the form of an observation:
A lot a lot a lot of words words words about birth control and abortion and men talking about and deciding issues that primarily effect women.
A lot.
I do not, however, recall, ever reading anything about the (possible) effects of the very recent advent of (the possibility of) paternal certainty on men’s sexual choices (or if I did read something, it wasn’t memorable.) This strikes me as a profound gap in the discussion of what women are for, or what men are for, or what any of this (whatever this is) is for.
More soon…
The title of his article strikes me as a little odd. What are women for, after all? It’s like he found some strange tool in the back of the garage, and is trying to make sense of its puzzling shape.Report
I thought I would reproduce a column I left elsewhere, expressing a related thought:
Though I do understand the historical basis for the position, I consider the notion that contraception is all about and only about the woman in the modern context to be rather bizarre. Do men gain nothing from the ability of women to prevent themselves from getting pregnant? Is restricting free condoms anti-male?
Though I recognize that women are more affected than men by these things, there’s something about the approach that I find aggravating. It’s the same mentality that has people rolling their eyes at the prospect of chemical contraception for men because of course men wouldn’t actually take it because men have no interest in preventing pregnancy. Nothing has really changed since the old days when a man got a woman pregnant and just walked away without social and financial repercussions. And so on.Report