Lapsed Modernist

I saw something about that yesterday...is that the same thing where they want sexual histories, in addition to medical services rendered?

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already2late.livejournal.com

Sexual histories and psychological profiles. Perverts.

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congogirl.livejournal.com

What are they trying to do???

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"But being involved in causing a miscarriage is not as severe as murder," Caplan said. "Ethically, you could argue that this seems wrong, but the law draws a sharp distinction between killing your child and a fetus that's not yet viable. That may strike some pro-life people and conservatives as wrong, but that's because some pro-life people and conservatives are fucking retarded and don't understand the distinction between 'life' and its metaphorical and potential counterparts."

sorry for fixing your words Caplan but it was important that the truth be out there. jesus fucking christ but it's past time we stopped indulging the terminally stupid.

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it's past time we stopped indulging the terminally stupid.

retoactive abortion? A time machine that travels back in time and bitch-slaps them nanoseconds before they are about to say something dangerously idiotic?

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those sound awfully promising but until they're invented I'm going to continue relying on soundly-placed kicks to the genitals.

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also I'd like it if you didn't use the phrase "backdoor assault" to describe fundamentalist erosion of human rights because honestly I have much sexier connotations for that phrase and I don't want to think of Jerry Falwell and his legions of slack-jawed zombies every time I get in that mood.

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What is your opinion of the Dan Savage referendum on "the Santorum"?

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okay so I'm what most people refer to as a "pervert" but I pick no bones if someone wants to coöpt that particular byproduct for political ends. and honestly I'm glad that someone thought up a word to describe the frothy mess anyways. "felch" never satisfied me because of the Richard Gere connotations.

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pdanielson.livejournal.com

Nice use of the umlaut.

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technically in this case it's a diaeresis. but I appreciate the props! I also recently discovered this Wikipedia entry which makes me very happy.

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pdanielson.livejournal.com

Alright, Snoop Dogg, enough with the grammatical technicalities, or I'll have to jack your brisket Philly-style.

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I meant to ask you before but I forgot: can you please elaborate on the following:

okay so I'm what most people refer to as a "pervert"

I ask because I find "pervert" to be a very useful word (unlike many of my friends who see it as a semiotically monolothic throwback to the 50s), but I think my discursive uses of it are not on the same page as the cultural conventions would have it.

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I like the word pervert because of its quaint historicity as well as its etymology. I mean, literally, the word traces back to a root of something like "one who turns things upside down," which is a really nice mental frame to use when thinking of one's deviant sexual practices (deviate: "to turn out of the way"-- all of these words are loaded in fun, punk-as-fuck ways). (I also prefer the archaic "invert" to any of its synonyms for homosexuality, for the same reason: "one who turns things the wrong way 'round.")

in what way do you find it a useful word, though? and in what way do your friends find it "semiotically monolithic"?

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"one who turns things upside down," which is a really nice mental frame to use when thinking of one's deviant sexual practices

That's such a delightfully carnivalesque approach.

So, to answer your questions, in the reverse order

1. My (more humorless, a.k.a. West-coast based) certain friends have taken issue with my use of the word, which is usually nowhere near as positive/playful as yours, but hardly corresponds to convention. I guess they consider it to be semiotically monolithic in the way that it has been used to do a Foucauldian split between "normative" and "naughty" with the latter falling into the category of Historically Persecuted. So, like, to them, the word is not one they wish to subvert or rehabilitate. These are also friends who DON'T laugh at the "how many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb? That's not funny" joke.

2. Now, onto what I mean by perversion. I usually use it in a negative, judgemental way, but I use it to describe phenomena that, to me, are like Nabokov's nonnons--fucked up little monstrous toys that come in a set with special distorted mirrors, and when reflected within those mirrors they look "normal." Situations or narratives that appear normal, but I think that normality is just a nonnon + mirror normality, that, to me, is perverse. It's like pre-encoded perversion. This is very abstract, I realize. Unfortunately the easiest examples I could provide have to do with sex and aren't the sort that I feel comfortable writing about in a public entry. But okay, I will try. For example, I feel like there is a pervasive discourse of normative healthy red-blooded virile American sexuality, but what it often amounts to in practice is perversion of jouissance, of desire itself. I mean, the flow of desire is somehow fractured, fragmented, bent into something truly perverse; perverse to the nature of desire, not "perverse" in a socially conventional way. On the other side of this (I realize, still rather abstract) spectrum: I think that America--I mean its strategically positioned, ahistorical synchronic-posing-as-diachronic noumena--is a model OF perversion (most notably of history into mythology) but also, fractally or something, a model FOR perversion, as all possibly positive factors (diversity, idealism, charity, reified ideas of individual freedom etc.) are perverted into something that, when reflected in the attendant mirror, synecdochically corresponds to the smooth surface. I am sorry, that was a horrible sentence. Okay, how about this...vampires aren't a perversion, but zombies are. I am happy to elaborate further.

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1. yeah, but what about the "how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? don't be silly; feminists never change anything" one? that answers my question, though-- I can't relate to the taking-victimization-very-seriously thing that seems to be so popular in some of the social groups I move in.

2. that is an awful sentence. a really, really dreadful one. :(

3. but back to your usage: I often use "perversion" in a negative way, and often in the service of the same judgement you describe. I mean, if I understand what you're saying. explain the vampire/zombie thing, though. or the sex thing, in a private entry, if you like. because I think I'd be better able to sink my teeth into that than into this big talk of noumena and synecdoche and diachronicity.

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actually, maybe this is a good way to begin a response to the model you present.

I suppose I could reframe my "carnivalesque" definition somewhat into your definitions, by commenting that it's always seemed fascinating to me that the concepts most likely to earn the epithets of "perverse" and "deviant" are only seen in that light because the nonnon mirrors don't beautify them. the angles aren't right, so the distorted and confusing reflected image we see calls our attention to the placement of those mirrors...? like, I have a fondness for what is thought of as "perverse" in a social conventional way (as distinct from the more deeply philosophical definition you employ) and that comes largely from the fact that people can rarely explain why something is perverse. or at least when they can, their definitions tend to be arbitrary, and tend not to explain why similar, yet normative things, are not.

perverse acts and beliefs are like optical illusions-- without breaking any rules, without undermining anything of importance, they call our attention to the assumptions and unstated shortcuts we bring to culture.

it's kind of neat like that. I also do use the term to describe fundamental, deeper inversions. George W. Bush's use of the word "freedom," Britney Spears, and the evolution of America's credit-based economy. but I certainly didn't mean to identify with those when I self-described myself as that; I was talking more about how much I enjoy tying up my lovers, and about how large my collection of tentacle rape hentai is.

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perverse acts and beliefs are like optical illusions-- without breaking any rules, without undermining anything of importance, they call our attention to the assumptions and unstated shortcuts we bring to culture.

now, that is a fantastic sentence.

I think we are more or less on the same page w/r/t the political/cultural/Dubya-freedom use of the word. Now, w/r/t the sex aspect of it, now I am interested in writing a coherent reply about it. Since this is in the interest of this dialogue, rather than general exhibitionism, I am going to post it as a post that only you can read.

as to the zombie/vampire question, that has to do with my favorite prefix "un" (which I liberally employ in neologisms, such as ungay, un-50s, etc), and the way in which "un" is a perversion, rather than a contradiction of the thing itself. Vampires are tranformed through death, zombies are Undead. Undead isn't the opposite of "alive," but it's not the opposite of dead either; just because the "death" status of a zombie is reversed, that does not revivify the zombie with the essence of life. Vampires have a thirst for warm blood, which sustains them, which to me means that their way of “living” is more of a dialectic between dead and alive, rather than the Way of the Zombie, which is just empty mimesis of diminishing returns. Vampires can sire others like them, and that is a process of tranformation, whereas a zombie making someone else a zombie is a process of pure negation. Vampires seem to have Desire, in the Lacanian sense, in looking for blood they are looking for the lost joussance, whereas zombies just want to eat brains, in a straightforward, literal, Like A Rock! kind of way. Vampires are sexy, and no one would ever want to sleep with zombies.
Both fall outside of normative "living," but maybe I would say that vampires are "perverse" in your sense of the word, and zombies in mine.

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Maybe this is just an enforcement of the state's right to require parental notification for pregnancies before viability when the woman is a minor, in a circumstance unforeseen by the legislature. Maybe they went this route to seal off any loopholes to the parental notification requirement for minors before viability, under Casey. If you can get assaulted and miscarry, you didn't need to comply with the law.

But I guess you're more wary of this prosecution. How might this dilute Roe v Wade, or more specifically Planned Parenthood V Casey (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=505&invol=833), (which reaffirms but modifies Roe)?

If Roe and Casey are to be overruled, i'd predict the right-to-lifers doing a direct challenge to it from a state passing an anti-abortion law and it being litigated to the Supreme Court with new members on the bench, in a few years, OR a Constitutional amendment.

/not a specialist in this area.

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right, but is there any interpretation of the state's "right" for parental notification which isn't in and of itself a direct assault on Roe vs. Wade? I mean, this is why we pro-reproductive-rights persons get so annoyed by this sort of precedent in the first place. because maybe it sounds reasonable that 14 year olds who want abortions should tell their parents ahead of time, in the same way that it sounds reasonable that the Soundgarden "Louder than Fuck" t-shirt should be prohibited in schools, but the mandates enforcing those statutes are so completely anathema to the concept of individual rights that it's only been possible to pass them by phrasing them in incredibly limited contexts and pretending that they're not undermining the most basic and integral freedoms of our society...

I mean, women with parasites in their body need to be legally allowed to remove them. this is a fairly basic point, and one which we can't allow to be undermined in any context, whether it's articulated as a religious point or as a parents' rights point or just as a misunderstanding of biology. I think that the moment you start looking at these cases in terms of being "wary of the prosecution" you miss the basic point that these are cases of fucking douchebags trying to prevent human beings from exercising their most basic human freedoms. like, I love my "Louder than Fuck" t-shirt. and I have had female friends who were happy to remove parasites from their body. and no one has any right to stop any of us.

fucking crotchkicks are in order. as I may have said before.

crotchkicks for douchebags.

that's my platform. I look forward to your vote this coming November.

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trochee.livejournal.com

crotchkicks for douchebags.

that's my platform.

you've got my vote. Where do I go to the polls?

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oh, and just to clarify, that whole mess is mostly a response to your "blue book" comment, which kind of dodges the issue that the laws in question were passed in the last 5-10 years, on a state-by-state basis (1999 in Michigan), so it's not as though the concept of blue book laws really applies here. it's not that I mean to challenge your well-written and quite considerate weighing of legal options.

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oh, no, with "blue book" i was referring to the blue books you use when you write essays on exams. I took the NY bar last week and I filled up 10 blue books in 6 hours. For the chica's post, i originally wrote a huge response, but then read it over and thought to myself: "Should I really bother anybody with all this analysis?" and then I reduced my comment to what I posted above, but left the subject line.

Basically this girl consented to assault, but the State can still charge a defendant with assault even if the assault victim doesn't press charges. Here, they charged the guy with assault under the Prenatal act, but couldn't charge the girl b/c the law wasn't meant to be applied to assault victims who consent for the purposes of causing their own miscarriage. That's why I don't see it creeping on the liberties of Roe and Casey, it merely secures the already litigated requirement of notice/consent of one/both parents for minors seeking abortions before viability. It's not a new exercise of control. It's just an odd and attention-grabbing story. That's my cautious and optimistic take on the events of this article.

--

Re: your comment

well, I tend to agree with Casey, as being a necessary update of Roe. When Justice Blackmun wrote Roe, he researched abortion at Johns Hopkins for a few months, but the trimester framework was so outdated by 1992, and science had progressed so far that Roe needed to be updated, while preserving the mothers right to chose. It jettisoned the trimester framework and substituted the undue burden test.

Before viability of the fetus, a "woman has a right to chose to terminate her pregnancy" but states may regulate previability abortions, so long as their regulation is not an undue burden (a substantial obstacle) in the path of the woman seeking the abortion. After viability starts, states are free to regulate or even prohibit abortions except when necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman, as the state has an interest in seeing the viable fetus come to term and be born.

I think, and this is probably where I disagree with you, that States do have a liberty interest in protecting the life of the unborn fetus after viability so long as their interest does not amount to excessive undue burden on the mother's right to chose - this is where O'Connor and Ginzburg stand, if i remember correctly.

Apparently you see any burden as an undue, excessive burden. A libertatian, I presume? I see theses type of requirements as potentially valid, from my own moral standpoint, where the mothers decision should not be unilateral and a state does have jurisdiction over your body and what you do with it. I believe the good of the many may be lawfully served by the ethical deprivation of the liberty of the few.

At least we are on the same side of the fence!

The link to the Casey opinion is enlightening, though tough reading. I suggest you slog through it to see how the debate is framed and where the justices draw the lines. It's a difficult opinion with different judges forming different coalitions, but this is where the law stands as of today on this heated subject.

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"Should I really bother anybody with all this analysis?"\

yes!!! do you still have it? If so, please post it.

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Sorry ms. chica, don't have it. It was boring and long-winded. It would have bored your socks off. You might have read it, but by the end, your feet would have been cold. Then, you'd look down at your feet and wonder "where have my socks gone?"

Your socks would be in the same place where gaskets and handles go when people get all angry and blow a gasket or fly off the handle. It happens alot with this subject.

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[cut; I wrote something about twice this long, and included a lot of vitriol about your "libertarian" comment and your assumption that I hadn't read the Casey opinion, but realized that most of it wasn't really immediately germane.]

That's why I don't see it creeping on the liberties of Roe and Casey, it merely secures the already litigated requirement of notice/consent of one/both parents for minors seeking abortions before viability. It's not a new exercise of control. It's just an odd and attention-grabbing story. That's my cautious and optimistic take on the events of this article.

see, that's exactly what horrifies me about this particular case, and what makes me incapable of not seeing it as an assault on RvW. by this reasoning, anyone complicit in a non-sanctioned abortion would be criminally liable-- which is a rounndabout way of criminalizing abortion. this case isn't about parental notification, even if, as

anthrochica points out, it probably only happened because of that retarded-yet-already-litigated statute. I guess if information were available to pubescent girls on how to self-abort, this might not be an issue, but I suspect that existing laws would be exploited to prosecuted providers of information, even in that out-there case.

this is, on one level, a case about a boy and a girl whose options were limited by obviously unconstitutional statutes and who, as a result, did something stupid. but it doesn't matter that it's about that. what matters is that it's about a girl who told a boy to hit her in the stomach with a baseball bat, and that the boy is being prosecuted for it, and that he's being prosecuted not for hurting her, but because a DA found a loophole in a law aimed at preventing domestic violence and used that as a way of punishing someone for abortion. that is, and I hope you'll pardon me for using technical jargon, bullshit. this is the only loophole here which I see as being worth closing. I mean, when these laws classifying fetuses as potential victims of violence got penned in the first place, we reproductive rights advocates got in a tizzy partly because there was no reason to make such laws in the first place, but mostly because it was obvious that they were only being legislated in order to be misused in cases like this.

which is why I think indignation and anger are the only reasonable responses to this case.

good luck with the Bar!

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good luck with the Bar!
Thanks!

Thanks for your responses too. I've never really gotten passionate about reproductive rights, so reading what you had to say is definitely enlightening as to what's being debated about.

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color me ignorant, but... he hit her? with a baseball bat? for weeks?

and ... his mom helped?

I'm confused.

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The mom didn't hit the girl with the baseball bat. The mom helped bury the effluvia. It's a fucked-up story, I agree, but one that seemingly wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the parental notification legistlature.

I HATE the language in this article
Legally, the baby could have been aborted.

It's not a BABY, it's a FETUS.

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oh, the article is wretched. but the people are just bizarre. if his mom helped bury it, then parents were notified, no? and wouldn't she be, oh, covered in bruises during delivery? I spose they thought they caught it early enough that she could just miscarry into a toilet or something. yeesh.

I really feel like there are pieces of the story missing, for me to get my brain around it. like, how did authorities get involved, who confessed to what, etc. it's all weird and fishy to me.

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well, the copy is so poorly written that it is hard to parse what happened when. But I deduce that the mom didn't know until after the fact. Also it wasn't a delivery, it was a miscarriage. And the girl talked to the guidance counselor (although it is unclear whether it was of her own initiative or not) and they notified the authorities. The whole story is insane, poorly articulated and creepy in its implications (legal).

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it's a shame no one ever gets press for having a successful, practical abortion which averted serious catastrophe and was an overall positive healthful outcome for everyone.

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