Oh, and BTW:
Right on!
And, actually, lactation as pregnancy prevention works pretty well *as *the “natural mammalian system of birth control practiced by animals and primitive people”. *Refusing *sex during lactation isn’t natural at all for humans. If you’re hunter-gatherer skinny and breastfeeding on demand and round the clock, it’s actually quite effective contraception up until the child is age 4 for women in current “primitive” tribal societies. Infertile sex during that time increases the mating bond, ensuring that the paternal figure sticks around to help feed the baby and mother both.
But it was better eating and more body fat that made that change, not patriarchy. Well fed women and women who can afford to feed wet nurses do not derive contraceptive effects from breastfeeding. Nor, of course, do women who abandon their infants, which I seem to recall was what this column was actually about.
Are you suggesting we should actually discuss the stuff that this column was actually about?!
Heretic!!
Even if a man’s a complete uncaring sexist pig, it’s still in his interest for there to be such a thing as birth control. If he gets a woman pregnant, he may face her father and his shotgun. If she’s worried about getting pregnant, it’s harder for him to con his way into her bedroom. Sure, a woman without birth control has a lot more to lose than he does, but why should he suppress birth control and cut off his nose to spite his face, especially when there are so many other ways to hurt women that won’t hurt him at all? I think lack of birth control has more to do with traditional sexual morality and with lacking technology than with sexism.
Well, if you think things are really all that peachy today, you might want to have a look at these…
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878746-3,00.html
You might want to check out this link, then…
http://www.drnorthrup.com/womenshealth/healthcenter/topic_details.php?topic_id=126
How the $*@# are we talking about fen-phen now? I’m so lost. So so lost…
That link is advocating, best as I can tell, cervical mucus only “FAM”, which has an effectiveness level right around a diaphragm without spermicide. The effectiveness numbers she’s using are *not *for this method, but for symptothermal FAM. Effective FAM and NFP - the symptothermal models - weren’t practical until the invention of digital thermometers. I assure you the mythical gynocrats weren’t using them.
And, to update my resume:
WhyNot,
Herbalist
Neopagan
Wymmyn
FAMer
Because you didn’t write the article.
The point was a minor one, but just happened to touch on your own personal bete noir. Two examples were given, but only someone with an ax to grind would assume that meant that Cecil was saying that others weren’t possible.
Indeed, “illegitimacy” implies a lack of access to birth control and abortion. Heck, the entire question implies it – if they were freely available then there wouldn’t be an issue about abandoning babies. But since they weren’t, they were not the real reason why women themselves were willing to give up their babies. They gave them up not because of birth control or lack of abortion (and, really, abortion always existed – it may have been illegal, but it happened all the time prior to legalization). It was because they were worried about being able to care for the baby, or because of the social stigma of an illegitimate child.
Or don’t you really care about what those women were thinking? Aren’t those women’s feelings important?
Cecil is writing a column and is not trying to get sidetracked in listing all the possible reasons for it. It just happens to be a touchy subject for you, and you automatically assume it’s some sort of plot simply because you only see the world only terms of your own biases, which is this case, are so strong you can’t conceive of any other possibility.
Cecil doesn’t often stop by the Message Boards, and then rarely to explain himself, especially when the explanation is pretty much obvious, as Reality Chuck and others have said.
Please remember that Cecil’s columns are limited in space (they’re designed for and syndicated for newspapers, with a word limit) and so peripheral issues usually get left aside.
W
I’m just trying to educate people about women’s issues. Here’s another link about native american birth control;
http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312140/ThinkQuest/Cheyenne/Native%20Americans%20in%20Medicine.htm
Also, I live about 45 miles east of a functioning matriarchy. You can even visit them, and they will tell you all about it. If you are so committed to women’s issues, why are you behaving like a macho jerk?
Cecil said; “Because it’s a secondary consideration. The primary factors are poverty and illegitimacy, as I said. Presumably if the woman weren’t poor, she’d have better access to birth control and abortion.”
Let me put this another way;
When considering this question;
Why were black people enslaved in America?
Which of these two answers carries a racial bias;
- Inferior weaponry caused them to be easily overcome.
or; - Not all persons were granted full civil rights under the law.
Have you ever heard of Joseph Campbell?
Perhaps you can tell us who you’re talking about, since we don’t know where you live.
It’s called Acoma Pueblo, just one of many matriarchal pueblos here in New Mexico. There’s Zuni pueblo, further out…where before white influence, children were not assigned gender by the adults…it was entirely up to the children to decide which gender they would identify as, regardless of what was in their skivvies. In Acoma, the men have their own kiva in the center of the village, the ‘boy’s club,’ if you will. Women are not allowed, nor is the boy’s club allowed to dominate and metatastize throughout every facet of human life, as it has in ours. I do not mean to say that it is a utopia, by any means, but if i could live there, i would.
I’m not sure the Acoma are a functioning matriarchy, but then maybe I have the wrong searches. For example, from here at the University of New Mexico: The Business of Culture at Acoma Pueblo:
(you spoke in present tense, so I’m assuming you weren’t talking about the past of the Acoma, which has a tremendous amount of uncertainty due to the massive records destruction (oral and otherwise) when De Onate and the Spanish massacred them.)
If you had in mind the reports of Dr. Hammond et al, as reported in the book Long Before Stonewall, my recollection is that the comments on fluid gender were really referring to special, transgendered or possibly even intersex individuals, not children in general. But then it’s been a while since I read that book, and I’m at work and don’t have it near me. Perhaps you can give me some sources you’re thinking of, just out of an information-gathering standpoint?
My sources, as always, are from the people themselves. I believe it to be the height of arrogance to assume that people wouldn’t be experts on their own dang culture.
Apparently, Margaret Mead was spoofed pretty well by some of the cultures she was studying.
And this:
I’m really going to have to ask for a cite. I think this would be the only culture ever that had this. Are you sure this isn’t just tribal folklore, along the lines of how things were all better before the white people showed up? Any proof at all that this was really the case?
When i visited acoma on one of my many visits, the women were just finishing up painting the interior of the church pink. I was told by our tour guide that the women kicked the men out at a certain point, and did it all in private. What with the handing down of property from mother to daughter, i’d say that’s a fair deal. What i pointed out was that men are not allowed to dominate every facet, as in ours. I didn’t say they were castrated. And anyway, what’s so superior about our psychotically suicidal culture?
Likewise, it would be a height of ignorance to automatically assume that a person on a message board who has not presented a Q&E, nor been around long enough to have been validated as a person who is an expert in the field, would have accurate information and/or be conveying it properly. Plus just because a person is a member of a tribe doesn’t mean they know their tribe’s history. Witness the number of grown-ups in Society in general who think Henry Ford invented the automobile.
So you’ll forgive me if your anonymous second-hand anecdotal information posted on a message board is at the stage where folks who are legitimately interested in the subject might be asking for some first-hand documentation of said claims. Surely if it’s true there’s some documentation readily available.
FTR, not every question is an attack on you, some of us actually care about topics enough to just ask for further information.