Speaking of identity – some of my friends have been trying to pin down exactly what “gender identity” is supposed to mean: whether there is a universally accepted, objective meaning for the term, and whether it makes any sense.

One elucidation that was offered is from Planned Parenthood, and it sounded odd, so I took a look.

PP elucidates on its Gender/Gender Identity page.

What Is Gender? What Is Gender Identity?

Each person has a sex, a gender, and a gender identity. These are all aspects of your sexuality. They are all about who you are, and they are all different, but related.

Sex is biological. It includes our genetic makeup, our hormones, and our body parts, especially our sex and reproductive organs.

Gender refers to society’s expectations about how we should think and act as girls and boys, and women and men. It is our biological, social, and legal status as women and men.

Gender identity is how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It is a feeling that we have as early as age two or three.

Those last two don’t make any sense in combination. They say two opposing things.

The first says, correctly, that gender is imposed on us from the outside: it’s society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male.

The second says, nonsensically, that gender identity is how we feel about and express society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male. Is it?! Isn’t it more how we do or don’t comply with society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male?

I don’t emote about society’s expectations about how I should think and act as female; I tell them to go fuck themselves. Is my “gender identity” therefore “go fuck yourselves”?

This is bullshit. They’re trying to have it both ways. They’re trying to combine two things that don’t combine. On the one hand yes gender is imposed on us, but on the other hand now that it’s been imposed on us let’s pretend it’s a big fun package and spend the rest of our lives playing with it.

I suppose they fell into this trap because they didn’t dare point out that society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male are systematically unequal; that females are supposed to think and act as submissive and subordinate to males; that males are supposed to think and act as dominant and superior to females. Oops. If they’d included that part, maybe they wouldn’t have talked the absurd bullshit about how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. But then that might have gotten them into trouble.

Everyday Feminism is such good comic value.

One of its new roads on the Great Map of Intersections is aromantic, “an orientation comprised of a complete lack of romantic interest, behaviors, and relationships.”

Aromanticitude of course has its corresponding Enemy.

The truth is that we’ve all been living under a cloud – choking on it – and hardly anyone else seems to notice it. It’s insidious, and it’s made a complete mockery of friendship and other forms of intimacy outside of romantic entanglements.

It’s so bad that even in the non-monogamous community, aros (a shorter name for aromantic people) are looked at strangely.

This toxic cloud is called amatonormativity – and it’s terribly harmful.

Called by whom? According to whom? That’s one of EF’s best jokes, the way people who write for it always assume their claims are just obviously authoritative and decisive.

Amatonormativity is, essentially, “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types,” according to Elizabeth Brake.

Oh good, an attribution. But why the assumption that because Elizabeth Brake said it, it therefore is true? Because it’s Everyday Feminism, that’s why.

Ironically, I have some sympathy with the ideas behind this, but the way they’re expressed makes it hard not to laugh.

The vast majority of information for non-monogamous populations is still heavily couple-centric, hetero- and cisnormative, ableist, and virtually completely romantically oriented.

Heteronormative, cisnormative, and amatonormative. No wonder Everyday Feminism has to do something about it. (And where does actual feminism come in? Don’t be silly, that’s so last century.)

4. Amatonormativity Leaves Aros, Asexuals, and Others More Vulnerable

I happen to be asexual, autistic, aromantic, and kinky – as well as left-handed. All of this leaves my brain wired extremely differently to most.

Asexual and kinky?

Ok that’s enough comedy for today.

Girls, puberty, bodies – what could possibly go wrong? Jan Hoffman at the New York Times reports on one thing:

So why aren’t more teenage girls out on the playing fields?

Research shows that girls tend to start dropping out of sports and skipping gym classes around the onset of puberty, a sharp decline not mirrored by adolescent boys.

A recent study in The Journal of Adolescent Health found a surprisingly common reason: developing breasts, and girls’ attitudes about them.

Is it surprisingly? Not if you are a girl or a woman, and you know what it’s like to develop breasts.

In a survey of 2,089 English schoolgirls ages 11 to 18, nearly three-quarters listed at least one breast-related concern regarding exercise and sports. They thought their breasts were too big or too small, too bouncy or bound too tightly in an ill-fitting bra. Beginning with feeling mortified about undressing in the locker room, they were also self-consciously reluctant to exercise and move with abandon.

Two globes bouncing around on your chest while you run and jump? Who wouldn’t want that?

“We make assumptions about what we think we know, so it’s important to be able to say that as cup size increases, physical activity decreases for a lot of girls,” Dr. Sharonda Alston Taylor, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who focuses on adolescent obesity.

What to do? Better support, first of all.

Joanna Scurr, the lead author of the study and a professor of biomechanics at the University of Portsmouth in England, said the breast itself had little internal support, so when a girl’s body moved, the breast moved independently, and the movement increased with breast size. In up to 72 percent of exercising women, she said, that movement was a cause of breast pain or discomfort.

Yet while sports and physical education programs frequently recommend protective gear for boys, like cups, athletic supporters and compression shorts, comparable lists for young women rarely include a mandatory or even recommended sports bra.

…

When researchers asked the girls how they would prefer to receive breast information — via a website, an app, a leaflet or a private session with a nurse — the overwhelming majority replied that they wanted a girls-only session with a female teacher.

A girls-only session with a female teacher? I don’t think that’s allowed any more.

What’s the difference between identifying as and being?

I’m not sure I know, myself. I don’t think I use the verb “identify as” very much. I guess I would use it if there were some kind of ambiguity or doubt or complication? Like, someone who grew up in the US but moved to the UK or vice versa – I could make sense of people saying, in that context, “I identify as [American/British] now because it’s been long enough” or alternatively “I still identify as [British/American] because it seems to be ineradicable.”

So “identify as” implies a certain level of will, of choice, of change or adoption or declaration, or else of failure to accomplish it. Yes? Whereas being doesn’t, by itself, although of course you can be things by choice – a fan, a practitioner, an adherent. But if you say “I’m a socialist” there’s no point in saying “I identify as a socialist” because the choice is already present in the word “socialist.”

There’s a little min-trend to complain about identity politics at the moment, so one might as well try to figure out what people mean by it. I did that several years ago while reading Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence and Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity, but I’m not sure the conversation is talking about the same kind of identity now.

One thing I think we all know pretty well: there are some things we can’t “identify as” without also being them. I don’t get to “identify as” Sioux or Zulu or Japanese, because I’m not any of those things and it’s appropriation to pretend I am. Ontology determines what we can “identify as”…except when it doesn’t. The exact nature of the rules that determine that is somewhat opaque.

Glosswitch has some thoughts on women as empty space.

Writing for Glamour magazine, Juno Dawson defends the right of trans women not to have to talk about their genitals: “This isn’t a coquettish fan dance where I’m trying to tease and conceal, it’s just that by not talking about my genitals, you might have to listen to what’s on my mind.” Fair enough, although somewhat naïve when one considers that for female people, assumptions made on the basis of our genitals have been a reason why people haven’t listened to what’s on our minds since the day we were born. This isn’t just a case of mindless objectification; it’s a process of sex class categorisation, and it’s one we cannot avoid unless we can really, truly convince people that we are not members of the potential gestator class. For us, what is “in our pants” is not a subject of morbid curiosity; it is the void that makes us exploitable, expendable and less than human. And either way, it doesn’t really matter whether people can see what is in our pants as long as they can still see our tits.

I admire the understatement of “somewhat naïve” when really it’s breathtakingly so. Guess what it’s like for women! It’s like being seen as people with no minds at all. It’s endlessly bizarre watching people who didn’t grow up being seen as female explaining to the world that women have minds. We already know that. We’ve known it for a long time. We’ve been explaining it to the world for a long time. It’s too bad you weren’t paying attention – but then nobody does pay attention to women.

I cannot help but feel the rawest anger at all the new ways invented to make women hate their own flesh and feel as though they do not belong. We are told that the narrative of the female body must not be exclusive, but we then create one that leaves women with nowhere to go. Our bodies are the only homes we have and here we are, suffocating beneath meanings that we can only control with the help of the surgeon’s knife.

We have brilliant stories to tell, too. We shouldn’t have to peel off our own flesh to prove we’re not empty inside.

I guess I should count myself lucky, spending most of my adult life thinking the world was finally really listening to women. It was nice while it lasted.

More from Orwell, As I Please – this time from June 9 1944, just three days after the invasion started but he doesn’t mention it. (Nothing surprising in that, there was plenty of mention of it elsewhere.)

A phrase much used in political circles in this country is ‘playing into the hands of’. It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are ‘playing into the hands of some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.

For example, if you say anything damaging about British imperialism, you are playing into the hands of Dr Goebbels. If you criticize Stalin you are playing into the hands of the Tablet and the Daily Telegraph. If you criticize Chiang Kai-Shek you are playing into the hands of Wang Ching-Wei — and so on, indefinitely.

That’s the Orwell who was so good at seeing through ploys for shutting people up. That’s one of them. In a way that’s the subject of Jacques Rousseau’s piece about Ntokozo Qwabe and the server – the way the justifiable disgust at Qwabe could get out of control and end up “playing into the hands of” racists – as it is doing. Jacques says there’s a Facebook page devoted to “Don’t serve Ntokozo Qwabe” and it’s full of racist comments, surprise surprise.

Objectively this charge is often true. It is always difficult to attack one party to a dispute without temporarily helping the other. Some of Gandhi’s remarks have been very useful to the Japanese. The extreme Tories will seize on anything anti-Russian, and don’t necessarily mind if it comes from Trotskyist instead of right-wing sources. The American imperialists, advancing to the attack behind a smoke-screen of novelists, are always on the look-out for any disreputable detail about the British Empire. And if you write anything truthful about the London slums, you are liable to hear it repeated on the Nazi radio a week later. But what, then, are you expected to do? Pretend there are no slums?

What indeed? It’s very often a quandary. I run into it a lot when blogging.

Everyone who has ever had anything to do with publicity or propaganda can think of occasions when he was urged to tell lies about some vitally important matter, because to tell the truth would give ammunition to the enemy. During the Spanish Civil War, for instance, the dissensions on the Government side were never properly thrashed out in the left-wing press, although they involved fundamental points of principle. To discuss the struggle between the Communists and the Anarchists, you were told, would simply give the Daily Mail the chance to say that the Reds were all murdering one another. The only result was that the left-wing cause as a whole was weakened. The Daily Mail may have missed a few horror stories because people held their tongues, but some all-important lessons were not learned, and we are suffering from the fact to this day.

Well said – and at the same time, nothing is gained by referring to the Germans as “the Huns.” It’s not an easy thing, to reconcile those, but we have to.

Maureen alerted me to Sian Cain’s Guardian article about Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Grasmere in 1799, living in Dove Cottage until 1808. Dorothy’s journals document their quiet existence: daily walks, afternoons with mutton pies, William’s headaches. The siblings composed poems and letters as they walked through miles of hills and thickets; on occasion visited by friends like Walter Scott, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a 1797 letter, Coleridge described Dorothy’s taste as “a perfect electrometer — it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.” Consider her description of daffodils near Gowbarrow Park:

I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew about the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.

Molly Worthen objects to the substitution of “I feel” for “I think.” She’s not just picking a nit.

The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that “I feel like” became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for “I think” or “I believe” only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: “I feel like” is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

Damn right. “I think” is something you can argue with. “I feel” not so much.

Yet here is the paradox: “I feel like” masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too — but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.

When people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn’t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,” Ms. Chai told me.

And for another reason, which is that they have already admitted it’s “just” a feeling, and only a bully would try to argue with a feeling. As Worthen says, it seems humble but actually blocks disagreement. Neat trick.

The problem here is not the open discussion of emotions. Ancient philosophers ranging from Confucius to the Greek Stoics acknowledged the role that emotion plays in human reasoning. In the 1990s, after many years of studying patients with brain damage, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio put forward a hypothesis that is now widely accepted: In a healthy brain, emotional input is a crucial part of reasoning and decision making.

So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.

But we feel as if it follows, so…loop loop loop.

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction — and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction — between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

Yes it does, and this (as you’re probably tired of hearing by now) is one of the reasons I’m not convinced by some claims popular with some trans activists – because of the way claims about internal feelings are treated as both sacrosanct and dispositive. Internal sentiments known only to each of us are inherently unreliable and incommunicable (the latter by definition). Internal sentiments known only to each of us are no basis at all for demanding “belief” from other people.

If our students have any hope of solving the problems for which trigger warnings and safe spaces are mere Band-Aids, they must reject this woolly way of speaking their minds. “Cultivating the art of conversation goes a long way toward correcting these things,” Dr. Lasch-Quinn said. “Instead of caricaturing someone who says ‘I feel like,’ we can say, what does it mean to say that instead of ‘I think?’ ”

We can, yes, but we should prepare to get a lot of shit in response. We’re expected to comply, not to think and not to ask.

Jacques Rousseau – who pointed out that story about Ntokozo Qwabe’s gloating triumph over a restaurant server to me – has some inconvenient observations on the reaction to Qwabe’s gloat.

First, what that reaction was:

Sihle Ngobese (SN) visited the restaurant, found the waitress – Ashleigh Shultz (AS) – and gave her the tip that the RMF table could (and should, unless they received terrible service) have given her, were it not for the fact that they objectified this woman as a placeholder for white oppression, despite knowing nothing about her, her politics, or her financial circumstances. (Something they of course should have been aware of is the likelihood that, as a waitress, she and some hypothetical intersectional movement might well find some common ground on the issue of class and privilege.)

…

Roman Cabanac and Jonathan Witt (who host the Renegade Report podcast on CliffCentral) started a Twitter crowdfunding campaign that ended up generating R44 778 in donations for the waitress in question. (Another crowdfunding effort also sprung up, generating an additional R15 000+.) [EDIT: Twitter user @GarethKourie points out that this second campaign has reached $5000, so, more like R70 000, meaning that AS has now been tipped around R115 000.]

Later on, we find out that the waitress has a mother who has cancer. This information was however not available at the time the campaigns started, so should be irrelevant to any analysis of whether the campaigns were appropriate or not – they were not generated to raise money for cancer treatment, but to offset her experience of abuse by RMF, and to demonstrate a moral counterweight to the callousness of NQ and his dinner companions.

I think you can sense where he’s heading – this kind of thing can turn into a version of the lottery, so it’s as well if the goods and bads of it are sorted out. Jacques doesn’t think they are.

Both of those goals could, in my view, have been achieved without creating the impression of a couple of (literally) white knights charging in to protect one of their own against the (literally) dark forces of RMF. And, creating that impression simply lends credence to one of the legitimate concerns of the RMF movement, namely that white South Africans (and people, in general) are far too unaware and unconcerned about the fate of black people compared to the fate of other whites.

And what could do a better job of demonstrating that than a windfall for a white worker stiffed by a black customer?

It’s of course true that it should, in theory, be possible to separate these issues from race, and to simply regard this as an act of generosity. But to think that people will (or even should) do so now in the political landscape that is South Africa is either naive or wilfull denialism. To refuse to countenance any criticism on this topic – as the Renegade Report hosts have done in their Twitter responses – is difficult to read as anything other than a commitment to making a point, rather than being humanitarians, even if the outcome of their commitment is a plus for humanitarianism, on balance.

That seems right to me. I think the point was worth making, but as Jacques says, it could have been made without the winning-the-lottery aspect.

This waitress is relatively undeserving of this gift compared to so many other people. The gesture can’t help but appear to be motivated less by generosity than by a vindictive “sticking to to NQ”, showing how much of a better person “we” (the donors) are.

And, as I said on Twitter, you’ll find that (or at least I find, and I eat out too many times every week) black waitstaff are routinely treated rudely, and (I imagine) tipped less generously than white ones, assuming that the level of expressed respect correlates with the level of financial support offered as tip. My claim is not that “if you can’t help everybody, you should help nobody” or something of that sort. Of course we are forced to pick our causes.

My point is that helping this one is a strike against the “fascist” RMF (as they have been described by at least one of the Renegade Report hosts), masquerading as charity, and that the optics of this case are exceedingly poor, serving to reinforce negative racial stereotypes.

It doesn’t help the argument to assert that some of the donors are black, or that this sort of argument is of the “social justice warrior” variety. The latter is a vacuous slur that completely escapes the force of argument in the sense that even if it’s true (and it is) that some folk concerned with social justice are knee-jerk thoughtless reactionaries, not all of them are. Arguments need to be addressed on their merits, not with cliches.

In short, it’s complicated, and a big windfall for the server isn’t necessarily the best response. It occurs to me to compare Kate Smurthwaite’s response to the nasty people who procured all the tickets to her Goldsmith’s show and then didn’t go, leaving her to perform for seven people – she requested donations to a charity for refugees, which got a windfall of several thousand pounds.

Read the whole post, because it’s excellent.

“Activism” gone wrong.

Cape Town – A controversial “Rhodes Must Fall” activist sparked an intense race row on social media this week after he posted about how he and other patrons at an Observatory restaurant confronted a white waitress.

Ntokozo Qwabe, who late last year made news for driving a campaign to remove a Cecil John Rhodes statue at Oxford University in the UK, said his friends returned a bill to the waitress saying: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND.”

She cried.

Wow. Brilliant. Withhold pay from someone serving food in a restaurant – that will teach the colonialists! Those people who serve food in restaurants have had all the power and money for far too long, and it’s about time someone took the struggle to them.

Another source has the Facebook post in which Qwabe boasted about this feat of punching down up.

LOL wow unable to stop smiling because something so black, wonderful & LIT just happened! And of course, the catalyst was a radical non-binary trans black activist – Wandile Dlamini – from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Because trans activists have BEEN the ultimate blessers of this decolonial struggle!

To cut the long story short, we are out at Obz Cafe with the said activist, and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask the said activist what the going rate for tips/gratuity is in these shores. They look at me very reluctantly and they say ‘give me the slip, I’ll sort that out’. I give them the slip.

They take a pen & slip in a note where the gratuity/tip amount is supposed to be entered. The note reads in bold: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”. The waitress comes to us with a card machine for the bill to be sorted out. She sees the note & starts shaking. She leaves us & bursts into typical white tears (like why are you crying when all we’ve done is make a kind request? lol!). Anyways, so this white woman goes to her colleagues who are furious. She exits to cry at the back & a white male colleague of hers reluctantly comes out to address us & to annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act “racist”.

CNN reports on Vietnamese girls trafficked into China to be rape-married.

The villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for human traffickers. Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged, then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. Young Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the gender ratio.

To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides.

Of course, “valuable commodity” doesn’t mean “to be respected and well treated”; it means “to be paid a high price for.” The money goes to the pimp, and the “bride” enters a life of slavery.

Nguyen was just 16 when a friend’s boyfriend drugged her and smuggled her into China. She tried to resist a forced marriage. For three months, she refused, even though her traffickers beat her, withheld food and threatened to kill her, she says. Finally, she relented. She says her husband was kind to her, but she never stopped missing her family in Vietnam.

“My desire to go home was indescribable,” Nguyen said. “I agreed to marry the man but I could not stay with a stranger without any feelings for him.”

When her mother-in-law realized Lan was never going to warm to the marriage, the family returned her to the traffickers. They got their money back, Nguyen says, after which she was forced into a second marriage.

Heads they win, tails she loses.

The good news is, China is co-operating with Viet Nam in trying to stop the trafficking.

During CNN’s trip to the border, the government called and told us the police had just rescued five girls as they were about to cross the border with a trafficker. We met the girls, who are just 14 years old. They said they were promised $600 to go to work in China by a neighbor from the same village. They didn’t tell their parents they were going. The neighbor is now under arrest.

The Vietnamese police are sometimes able to rescue women even after they have crossed into China, by enlisting the help of Chinese authorities. Nguyen Tuong Long, the head of the government’s social vice prevention department in Lao Cai, says last year they rescued and returned 109 Vietnamese trafficking victims.

“Because of cooperation between the Vietnamese and the Chinese police, we have found and caught trafficking rings,” Nguyen says. “We’ve found women far inside China, at brothels where they’re forced to become sex workers.”

Slaves. Sex slaves, not sex workers. But it’s good about the trafficking rings.

H/t Freemage

Human Rights Watch did a big report in 2007 on Nicaragua’s total ban on abortions, including those to save the woman’s life, and its predictable results.

Nicaragua is one of only three countries in the world to maintain a blanket ban on abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.[1]Such blanket abortion bans are incompatible with international human rights obligations, including obligations on the rights to life, health, and non-discrimination. Their imposition can, and most often does, have serious effects on the lives and health of women and girls.

Nicaragua’s blanket ban on abortion was initially enacted in November 2006 and reaffirmed in September 2007, and includes a ban on previously-legal therapeutic abortions.[2]It allows for prison sentences for doctors who carry out abortions under any circumstances-even to save a pregnant woman’s life-and on women who seek abortions, again, regardless of the reason. Although it appears that actual prosecutions are rare, the ban has very real consequences that fall into three main categories:

1. Denial of access to life- or health-saving abortion services;
2. Denial or delay in access to other obstetric emergency care; and
3. A pronounced fear of seeking treatment for obstetric emergencies.

The net result has been avoidable deaths.

It’s hard to think of a more thorough dismissal of women as people than this – a law forbidding hospitals and doctors to save the lives of women if their pregnancies are killing them.

At that point there had been no prosecutions that HRW or its informants knew of, but the fear of prosecution was having a terrible effect all the same.

It is impossible to ascertain how many women the blanket ban has prevented from accessing safe therapeutic abortion services and with what effect. Nicaragua’s Health Ministry officials told Human Rights Watch that they did not have any official documentation of the effects of the blanket ban and no plans for gathering such documentation.[18]

A medical doctor at a large public hospital in Managua, however, testified to one case:

Here [at this hospital] we have had women who have died. For example, [name withheld] came here and had an ultrasound. It was clear that she needed a therapeutic abortion. No one wanted to carry out the abortion because the fetus was still alive. The woman was here two days without treatment until she expulsed the fetus on her own. And by then she was already in septic shock and died five days later. That was in March 2007.[19]

Her life doesn’t matter, apparently.

Valerie Tarico has an extraordinary essay about what’s really behind the idea of “fetal personhood.”

The notion that life begins at conception is a variation on a very ancient cultural theme: penis worship.

I’m slow sometimes, but after years of writing about abortion rights it finally occurred to me that “life begins at conception” is one more version of a multi-millennial infatuation with the penis as symbol and proof that manliness is next to godliness.

Because it’s magic.

What creates the wonder of a new person? Forget about the maturation of germ cells, and the nine-month labor of a woman’s body, and painstaking parental nurture. It’s a sperm, a penile projectile shot forth by the ultimate organ of demi-divinity. Sperm penetrates egg and voila! A person! A new soul! All the extraordinary and unique value we accord to human life is created instantaneously.

Ahahahahaha – so it is. One touch of the penis and presto, a miraculous human being is formed.

They also insisted that a man’s magic wand could permanently transform a female from one kind of being to another, from a prized “virgin” into a worthless “whore.” In medieval Catholicism’s recipe for sexual hang-ups, the prior touch of a penis (or lack thereof) became the most defining aspect of a woman’s identity, economic value, and moral virtue. Penis penetrates female and voila! No longer a whole person! The same magic wand that made her valuable could also do the reverse.

Fundamentalists who are anchored to the Iron Age by sacred texts and patriarchal traditions still hold to this archaic view, though they may use updated terms like “licked lollypop” or “chewed gum”—and some do offer second chances through “born-again virginity.”

But at least in the West, millennials finally are catching on to how ridiculous the whole virginity thing is. As one Facebook meme put it recently, “I don’t believe in virginity. Why? Because nobody’s penis is important enough to change any part of my identity.”

Now that is the way to talk about identity.