I know that I am a little hung-up on Mike Huckabee’s libido remarks, but I can’t help myself. I am certain that someone, somewhere knows what the hell he was trying to say, but I haven’t found them yet. Certainly, I cannot rely on Kathleen Parker. After all, she thought he got off to a good start:
What Huckabee was saying was that women are not just packages of reproductive parts whose lives are circumscribed by access to birth control. This is the thinking he ascribes to Democrats. Instead, he said, Republicans are fighting a war for women “to be empowered to be something other than victims of their gender.”
Not bad so far, but then . . . uh-oh.
See, as soon as Huckabee suggested that women are “victims of their gender,” a little alarm bell went off in my head that told me that something was amiss. I know, I know that Huckabee was suggesting than Democrats think of women as victims of their gender, but he was also saying that Republicans want to help them overcome this misfortune. Instead of praying away the gay, they want to relieve women of their feminine plight.
How?
I don’t know.
But it isn’t by empowering them to avoid having a baby every time a man climbs on top of them.
Ms. Parker seems confused about this. But logic isn’t her strong suit. Take, for example, her thoughts on the so-called War on Women:
The alleged war on women was based essentially on the notion that people who think abortion is a bad idea — or who don’t think the government should mandate insurance coverage for birth-control coverage — are anti-woman.
Democrats point mainly to new state laws that have limited access to abortion, not to mention the unforgettable observations of a few Republican men about “legitimate” rape and so on.
Whatever one’s own position, Republicans could be characterized as waging a war on women only if no women agreed with the premises mentioned above.
Something is already wrong when you begin talking about abortion rights as if they are a “good” or “bad” idea. But it is really a stretch to suggest that a political party cannot be hostile to a group of individuals if even one member of the impacted group actually consents to their own mistreatment. Using that logic, if there was even one slave who liked their living conditions and didn’t want to be set free to leave the plantation, then slavery couldn’t have been a war on black people.
Further proving that Kathleen Parker has no more idea what Huckabee was talking about than I do, she asks the following question:
Who, really, is worried about women’s libidos?
Of course, the answer is every man who knows he isn’t satisfying his wife. And Mike Huckabee.
Maybe it is time to ask why we care what one person says about anything. Pundits are paid to be provocative and, as Glen Beck admitted, they do us all a disservice by stirring the pot of hatred and mistrust.
The job of a pundit is to cause trouble. Huckabee succeeded and so did Mr. Longman. Perhaps this medium has outlived its usefulness to humanity.
in the american media, pundits are hardly ever paid to be provocative. They are paid to be willfully obtuse, to see false equivalences, and to misinform the public for the benefit of their corporate employers.
I don’t need any pundit to tell me to mistrust misogynist troglodytes like Huck. He’s causing his own trouble, and our esteemed host has nothing to do with that.
One way to look at it would be to see how the same argument applies to other issues. Suppose you were against dental coverage for some stupid reason?
Women are only “victims of their gender” if they are unable to have control over their reproductive lives. Huckabee’s statement is ludicrous because Republicans, by trying to eliminate access to abortion and contraception, are trying to force women to be victims. It’s Democrats who are fighting for choice and empowerment.
Throwing in the bit about all women basically needing free contraception because they’re sluts at heart was just icing.
I’ve always thought Huckabee was a thoroughly vile person and this hasn’t changed my perception any.
It’s tough to be intelligible to gain a political advantage when one holds mutually incompatible primary beliefs. They loathe the women that have children that they can’t support on their own family financial resources. Loathe forms of birth control that limit or reduce the number of children that responsible women of limited means want. Loathe the state for most public social goods, particularly for feeding, housing, and educating poor children. Loathe the state that offers free birth control to women of limited financial means. They refuse to deal with the reality that the choice is either birth control (all forms) or more children requiring public goods. In their la-la-land, denying women affordable birth control = fewer poor children. And if not, they are okay with letting those children starve to death.
Very odd that they don’t have rallies and marches decrying the fact that Medicaid pays for almost half the births in the US.
At another level — partially or mostly unconscious — is an existential threat. The dreaded thought that if not for birth control prohibitions (legal and/or religious), they wouldn’t exist.
the apologist’s problem with mansplainin’ (or whitesplainin’ or gringosplainin’ etc etc) is that specimens are impossible to probe without exposing to deadly ridicule the deep-seated contempt for both the target (who’s supposed to be too brainwashed to know better) and the general audience (who’s supposed to be too stupid to notice).
mansplainin’ never survives outside its natural environment — the hindbrains of misanthropes — and attempts to keep it alive prove more pathetic than charitable.
Who’s worried about women’s libidos? That’s easy. Every so-called conservative who’s afraid of female sexuality. Women aren’t supposed to want sex. At least good girls don’t. Once married, it’s alright to want sex but only with their husbands. If birth control is too easy to obtain, then these weak-willed little creatures will say yes to their demonic drives and yes to Satan, screwing around before marriage and screwing around on their husbands. Hell, some of them might even fornicate with “nigras.” It’s a scary scary world when you’re “conservative.”
I agree that it’s just about impossible to untoss Huckabee’s word salad, but when you write
“As best as I can tell, he was saying that Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they can remain chaste until marriage, as they should”
it lets him too far off the hook.
At the least, he is also saying one of two other things:
(1) That Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they have both the desire and the power to deny sex to their husbands once they have given birth to all the children they plan on. Or
(2) The Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they are eager to get pregnant whenever their husbands get horny.
Enough power to deny their husbands sex often enough to create marital discord and not often enough to prevent additional unwanted pregnancies.
Lysistrata.
You’re thinking like a liberal, Boo – someone who cares what the wife thinks. People like Huckabee and Wingnuttistan’s other old white guy residents are terrified of women’s libidos for a much more basic reason: if you accept that women have libidos of their own, you also have to accept that they are independent, sentient creatures with their own agendas. Rather than, you know, appliances. Republicans don’t think women are victims because experiencing oppression requires having desires (of whatever type) that aren’t being met. And a real woman – one who’s not being “victimized” – is happy and fulfilled solely by being an instrument of her husband’s will. They honestly think the “victims” here are the women deluded by feminazis, or distracted by all that governmental Free Stuff, from embracing what these misogynists think of as their only real purpose. I wish I were exaggerating. I’m not.
For “Christians” like Huckabee – and I grew up with a lot of them – women exist only as instruments of their husbands’ will; women who don’t have husbands are fundamentally incomplete (and lost); and women who don’t want husbands are somewhere between mentally ill and tools of Satan. As with slavery, the Bible is a handy way to justify a patriarchal worldview that just happens to give these guys a lot of power over others just because they were born with a dick or a melanin deficiency. This also comes with zero responsibility for the problems of others.
Being terrified of, angry at, and/or resentful of the very thought of women having libidos is inseparable from the gross misogyny of the base premise here. And yeah, women can be misogynists, too, Ms. Parker.
Yeah, this.
Republicans are defending women from having to live independent lives that aren’t 100% controlled by their husbands or fathers.
See, Democrats treat women as if they’re a complete individual with their own reproductive organs that are more complex than men, and that is the real war on women!
This shit ain’t rocket science.
One gets the sense Mike Huckabee thought he was being terribly clever and had no idea he was actually giving away the game. He’s like the guy who gleefully shouts “Check!” only to have his opponent respond: “Checkmate.”
The use of ‘libido’ by Huck seems the clue here. It doesn’t seem a word he would use in everyday conversation and indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if he had to look it up when he was writing his presentation.
Libido taunting allowed him to weight his premise wholly as a woman’s sexuality problem. He asked his listeners to forget the role entirely of his libido women’s partners.
Is there no one in his family that uses prescription birth control and is the more responsible person for it?
Maybe Huck can’t get it up?
As observed elsewhere, he doesn’t seem to understand how birth control pills work. sounds like he thinks they’re morning after pills or something.
He’s just confusing them with Viagra.
Republicans and the naive always begin with their own direct experiences from which they generalize to others in not so similar situations. Viagra would be what Huck’s familiar with. And he has his libido under control with a blue pill.
I don’t really think that it’s all that complicated.
Huckabee believes in personhood amendments….
So, that means that he believes that women should have no control over their own bodies.
That is in essence what birth control is about. A woman deciding FOR HERSELF when she would have children, IF she would have children, and what she wants to do for herself – sexually.
I honestly don’t see why this is difficult for you.
1993. Parker somehow found herself in Northampton, MA.
Now Hamp is a wonderful place, across the historic Connecticut River from Amherst and inundated with top tier colleges. I have worked in Cambridge and Berkeley, and I would be happy to hang my hat in this charming city.
Parker hated it. She was afraid of the lesbians, and the freaks with their tattoos and piercings. All the heady intellectual atmosphere rolled off her like gold dust suffused water off a duck’s back.
Since that day I have found precisely zero reason to have any interest in any opinion she has on anything, and I am disappointed (as much as I can muster up the energy to be, after so many beatings) in the traditional media for affording her such an exalted perch. In short I consider her to be a grade C David Brooks wannabe.