Today in Your Feminist Backlash

[Content Note: Reproductive rights; misogyny.]

1. A six-day arc in the long-running comic strip "Doonesbury," which follows a woman getting an abortion, is being relocated from the LA Times' comics page to the op-ed page.

In the strips, a young woman at an abortion clinic is chastised by a male legislator who calls her a "slut," and a doctor rebukes her by reading a scripted greeting from Texas Gov. Rick Perry in advance of her "compulsory transvaginal exam." While awaiting the exam, the woman is placed in a "shaming room."

"We felt the story line was a little over the top for a comics page," said Alice Short, a Times assistant managing editor.

I'm pretty sure pro-choice female readers are already well aware of the legislation being passed to curb the bodily autonomy of women et. al., and literally cannot escape (short of leaving the country) the campaign of violent misogyny being waged from every statehouse and virtually every source of mainstream media, so basically the Times is worried about offending the delicate sensibilities of their anti-choice and/or cis male readership. What a terrible thing it would be if they had A MOMENT OF DISCOMFORT WHILE READING THE FUNNY PAGES while people with uteri are rendered property of the state inch by fucking inch!

2. A Georgia legislator (GUESS WHAT PARTY! GO AHEAD AND JUST GUESS!), who just coincidentally happens to be a dude, gave a speech in support of HB 954, "which makes it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks even if the woman is known to be carrying a stillborn fetus or the baby is otherwise not expected to live to term," in which he "compared women seeking abortions of stillborn fetuses to cows and pigs. ... He then delivered an anecdote to the chamber in which a young man who was apparently opposed to legislation outlawing chicken fighting said he would give up all of his chickens if the legislature simply took away women's right to an abortion." GREAT STORY!

3. Via Maria at 2 Political Junkies, here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World Summit, having to, in the year two thousand and fucking twelve, talk about how extremists still want to control women and the most basic aspects of our lives:

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim—they all want to control women. They want to control how we dress; they want to control how we act; they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and our own bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe, but even here at home, we have to stand up for women's rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us because America needs to set an example for the entire world.

Not for nothing, but it's hard for America to "set an example for the entire world" when its leader won't even give this idea the most cursory lip service.

You know, I genuinely don't like playing the What If Alternate Universe game about a Hillary Clinton presidency, because it's usually a waste of goddamn time. No one can know for certain what her presidency would have looked like, and, particularly in the foreign policy arena, it probably would have looked frustratingly the same.

But there is one thing I know as well as I know my own fucking name, and that is this: There is no way in hell that President Hillary Clinton would have remained silent while Republicans waged a war on women.