Roe v. Wade — the landmark Supreme Court case establishing access to abortion as a constitutional right — has been settled law for over 40 years, yet remains under constant attack. With President Donald Trump in office, we face potentially the greatest threat to reproductive rights in more than a generation. The Center for Reproductive Rights updated our 2007 report, What If Roe Fell?, in order to answer the question on everyone’s mind on the 45th anniversary of Roe: what will happen if Roe were toppled in your state, the day after?
i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!
In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”
Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”
I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”
So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.
This is something I often see with my male friends? Some of them just get tired hanging out with a big male group because it becomes this thing of outdoing each other and it gets exhausting.
It’s not an individual guy thing, I find, but a lot of groups of dudes tend to be more competitive than actually just trying to chill out and hang out in the quiet and as a social feature it’s not sustainable.
Hashima Island, nicknamed “the Battleship Island” due to its appearance, was a small island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, that served as a coal mine, forced labor camp, and comfort station before and during World War II. Koreans were abducted, “conscripted,” or tricked by the promise of safety and better lives — many men, including young boys, were sent to Japan and worked in dangerous conditions in labor camps, factories, and mines, while women and young girls were sent to “comfort stations” throughout Japan and Asia, where they were sex slaves, or “comfort women,” for Japanese soldiers.
In addition to Koreans, Imperial Japan also targeted people from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, among others. An estimated 450,000 male laborers were sent to Japan, while as many as 500,000 women were abducted throughout the war. Estimates of the total number of civilian deaths throughout Asia due to mass killings, rape, forced labor, starvation, and human experimentation at the hands of Imperial Japan goes as high as fourteen million.
Around 80% of comfort women were Korean. Most women were between ages 14-18, though many were described as being abducted before they could menstruate. Survivors have described being raped twenty to thirty times a day, every day, day and night. Many women died from sexual trauma, diseases, or beatings or stabbings from Japanese soldiers, or were massacred at the end of the war. One Japanese soldier described: “The women cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether they lived or died. We were the emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.”
Much of the rightwing population and media of Japan, including Japan’s current prime minister Shinzō Abe, believes that comfort women never existed or that their stories are exaggerated, and that forced labor was not used. The city of Osaka ended its sister city designation with San Francisco last year when a memorial to comfort women was erected in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Many rightwing journalists have attempted to disprove survivors of forced labors camps, saying that they lied or exaggerated. Politician Tōru Hashimoto said that violence and coercion were never used by the Japanese military on civilians, while also describing the use of comfort women as “necessary” — all of this, despite the accounts of survivors, confessions from Japanese soldiers, and the existence of incriminating photographs and Imperial Japanese documents. One survivor named Kang Il-chul, who was 16 when she was abducted, said, “The prime minister says there is no proof that we existed, but I am living proof.”
In 2015, Japan submitted Hashima Island as a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to “its role in the rapid industrialization of Japan.” South Korea opposed this, but a compromise was reached, where Japan promised to include descriptions of how Koreans were “forced to work under harsh conditions” on the island. However, after the island was made a World Heritage Site, Japan said that “the remark ‘forced to work under harsh conditions’ did not mean ‘forced labor.’” While UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee required that the victims of Hashima are remembered, the island’s official tourism website and tour program do not currently acknowledge this.
The South Korean film The Battleship Island sparked outrage in Japan among rightwing viewers, who say that the film is exaggerated and false, anti-Japan, and distorts history to demonize Japan. Rightwing Japanese critics also joyfully bragged that the film didn’t even do well (despite it being praised by critics, setting the record for biggest opening in South Korea, being the first film in South Korea shown at more than 2,000 movie theaters, and winning more than a dozen awards at film festivals).
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
It may also interest someone to know that swans can projectile poop.
I know a real-world mama swan who got shot in the wing and walked four miles overland to get back to her babies and dad swan, with her broken wing bleeding and dragging the whole way. She just kept going. Don’t mess with lady swans.
Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)
And when a swan decides to beat you up, it is not with fancy martial arts. Swans are brawlers. They have bone clubs built into their wing joints specifically for beating people up. A human swan is gonna come at you screaming and spitting and just keep punching you in the face until you regret every decision you have made ever in your life and also some of the ones your parents made too.
i swear to god, men raising their voice is the most terrifying thing in the whole world. they dont understand, like its an immediate panic response, game over
I actually had no idea women found this so scary
my downstairs neighbors fight on a regular basis, and every time he starts yelling i’m a little afraid he’s going to kill her. i have no reason to think this except that he is a man and he is angry
My math teacher has a loud voice and a temper and he scares the living shit out of me almost everyday. He’s made me and other kids cry more than once and he and his teacher buddies make a joke out of terrifying students.
this was women in general? i knew my gf didn’t like it but I was unaware if this affected most women
Yes, it does
As a woman, I had no idea it effected other women like this. I was too afraid to even talk about it. I thought I was weak. Thanks for bringing attention to this.
My dad thinks it’s funny that I used to cry when he raised his voice. I freak out whenever some one does. Once my director did, and I started crying I couldn’t stop. I’m glad to see I’m not alone…
This is so important– seeing how common this is– and I also want you all to know that this is not normal. It isn’t something instinctively ingrained into women, to be afraid of men. There is no natural state of men being a threat that women constantly have to be afraid of. This is cultural. So many women and girls here have a mutual understanding of this feeling, and I think it really shows an unsettling truth about our society, particularly about how men are raised to act and how so many women have this defensive reaction gradually develop. It’s so important that these people have their voices heard, because it teaches us about problems that we just can’t deny the existence of any longer.
I’m glad I’m not the only one
My fellow men, pay attention. I didn’t realize how scary this could be until one of my exes explained it to me, and it’s heartbreaking.
Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)
Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.
I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.
I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.
Don’t tell me it’s too hard, that you just can’t do it, or that you “shouldn’t have to.” I’m 53 years old and just now getting the hang of it, and if this old dog can learn something new, so can you.
Note to guys: It really, REALLY doesn’t matter if you’re thinking, “but I would never…”
History is littered with the bodies of women who believed a man “would never.” This includes women killed by men who honestly, deeply, truly believed they “would never”… right up until she said that one thing or moved in just that way and he just got so mad, just that once, and pushed her or punched her or slashed her or shot her… just once, y’know, to shut her up, or because she was flinching and didn’t she know that HE’S NOT LIKE THAT and I’LL TEACH HER TO BE AFRAID OF ME…
We are trained, from infancy, that Men With Loud Voices are a source of pain from which we cannot escape, and attempts to escape may result in more pain. And as soon as we’re old enough to comprehend a world broader than our immediate circle, a world that extends into the past and will run into the future, we realize that there is no way, no way at all, to tell which men “would never” and which men “would never… except if.”
We live or die on that “if.” And any man who doesn’t like facing that hyper-vigilance can work on fixing OTHER MEN, not women’s fear.
The reaction shouldn’t be “not all men are like that;” it should be “no woman should have to live in fear.”
It’s telling that so many people will hear a story of long-term abuse and say, “why did she stay with him?” and not “why did he treat her like that?”
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