Status Updates From Reproductive Wrongs: A Shor...

Really great final paragraph:
“We need to take account of information warfare in its most sophisticated, most insidious, most powerful form ever. We need to know what people are actually made to believe about the female body, and what those beliefs can incite them to do.”

“Long after Queen Victoria's holiday family tableaux fell into obscurity, Dickensian imagery and sentiments ruled. There should be many children around the evening fireplace and the holiday table. A little girl's tender gaze will melt any amount of adult woe, so it does not really matter that she is growing up in dire or squalid conditions”

Thinking about Harry Potter, an orphan who could be a Dicken’s protagonist, the Weasley family, expansive and poor but joyful

“The large family is the happy ending toward which most of [Dicken’s] plots aim. The only conceivable refuge for his young, virtuous, good-looking protagonists, if they can get through all their bizarre obstacles, is a cozy, full home, the great harbinger of which is a servile, tender, sentimental girl, naive and malleable and strictly home-oriented even though she might have been exposed to many hard knocks.“

“It had been demonstrated, after all, that sadistic thugs masquerading as religious and moral leaders and an absurdist excuse for a legal system could make a busy show of prosecuting women's imaginary crimes and ignore men's actual, habitual, heinous ones: of violence, of corruption, of foreign rampages and local oppression.”

“Witch-hunting inquisitors seem to have been the first people to address themselves fearlessly to the problem, and in their solutions, they landed somewhere between the punishment fetishist and the incel who murders women he can't have.“

Also this author alludes to The Handmaid’s Tale often

“Silent, marginal women, particularly the poor and single mothers, proved vulnerable to witch-hunting, but it was well-placed housewives who seem to have primarily attracted attention in the era of more intense witch-hunting. In overwhelming numbers, the documented victims are married or widows-that is, not servile
or outcast women but women presiding over their own homes.”

Almost annoying that Augustine took his guilt and sadness over his actions and propelled the Dark Age beliefs of purity culture, sin of lust, and sexual relationships purely for procreation— I mean what fun is it to be a “seed bed” for children! No family no love just pure seclusion! Another meaning to the dark of the Dark Ages I suppose

“Whatever women do, they can't do it in the right way, measuring up to the miraculous widow who wishes neither to marry nor to remain single, and who somehow manages to keep up her costly charitable giving and services without any assured income, and thus no morally ruinous financial independence.”

I think the self-contradiction and double standards become so apparent in this discussion

“[The Pastoral Epistles] lay out the basis for the loneliness, overwhelming responsibility, and self-loathing that… made motherhood a legendary misery, and the relationships between mothers and children comparatively fraught. This is because Christian motherhood was designed not for the good of the mother, the family, or the clan, but to put women in their place and keep them there.”

“ Women come in as this authors, chief preoccupation because women talk. It is their age-old reach toward public life. It is often their only pretension to public life, and they are (for all their educational deficits) quite good at it.”

“Men who …imposed a sort of Christian uniform—special, very plain and cheap attire and hairstyling that labeled them as members of this vulnerable group-made it more dangerous for them to go out. The prescribed female look not only humbled Christian women but helped keep them isolated and confined, without options beyond serving their men uncomplainingly.”

I’m either too tired to be reading or chapter one was hard to follow

“In Ovid's grand, hysterical scheme, these infanticides come across as lesser crimes. Procne and Medea kill their children out of rage when they are horribly provoked; it is cruel of them, but to a degree understandable, and the consequences do not reverberate down history.

Abortion is thus depicted as the ultimate crime, exponentially worse than killing your little boy…”

Virigin Mary argument still used today

“Abortion was never outlawed outright or sweepingly in antiquity. And the laws on the books, and the recorded prosecutions, concern the rights of men, not fetuses”

Men too embarrassed to bring the adultery to light.

It served ”men’s interests more than women”