Usually called the doctor. Or the caretaker.

A Utah bill passed by the state House and Senates has been sent to the governor's office. This bill amends several state laws in order to make it possible to prosecute a woman for criminal homicide if she loses a pregnancy due to what is deemed "criminally reckless behaviour". She is not liable for criminal homicide if the miscarriage was caused by simply negligent behaviour, although apparently an early version of the bill read that way. She is also not liable for criminal homicide if the miscarriage results from her failure to follow medical advice.

Unfortunately, this doesn't protect women who accidentally fall and lose a pregnancy, speed while pregnant and are hit by another car and lose a pregnancy, fail to wear their seat belts and get into a car wreck which causes a miscarriage, etc.

Penalties include prison sentences, including the possibility of life in prison. For having a miscarriage.

RHRealityCheck.org's coverage here, and the text of the bill can be viewed online here.

Link thanks (I think) to hammercock.

Colour-changing cuttlefish inspire new display technology.

The Taming of the Cat. It took place earlier and in a more restricted location than was once presumed. This is an interesting article that incorporates genomic study, archaeological evidence, and ancient art to support a timeline of domestication for the housecat that varies greatly from what was previously believed. Cats have been living with humans for 10,000 years, yet they remain, with a few physiological exceptions, fundamentally unchanged from their wild ancestor: Felis silvestris libyca, the Libyan wildcat. Interestingly, their domestication is incomplete to this day: the housecat is as a species only feral at best, tolerating and accepting human cohabitation and interference, but by and large housecats are still perfectly able to function in the wild.

Turning away from science and to pop culture, this essay at Tigerbeatdown on the movie Observe and Report and its rape scene is quite astute.

Or, I Am Neither a Lever Nor a Place to Stand.

So here's a thing:

Our culture encourages sex crimes against women. It makes excuses for men who perpetrate them, it blames the victim rather than the rapist, it encourages habits of male-female interaction that are unhealthy for everyone involved. It also encourages the victimisation of men by upholding behavioural norms that are profoundly gendered, such that men who step outside these gender norms are rendered feminised and thus subject to violence just as women are.

It's pretty widely acknowledged that our culture is broken and has to be fixed. But something I see over and over again when men, rather than women, talk about our culture being fixed, is that women have to do it. The responsibility, the onus, is on women to "stop living in fear". The thing is, though, that half the world are not OCD freaks with a laundry list of phobias who touch lampposts and flick switches constantly like some kind of female Monk. Women who watch their backs, lock their doors, carry pepper spray, etc etc, don't do it because they have some kind of bizarre disorder. They do it because they have formulated coping mechanisms for living in a world that has been represented to them--and not without reason--as being fundamentally unsafe for female habitation. It's not ideal, but it's the best option a lot of women have: to live as though at any moment they might be under attack.

Our culture perpetuates this by telling women that, if they are attacked, they must have done something wrong, because good girls, safe girls, wouldn't have to worry. They'd do the Right Things™ and somehow magically the Wrong Sort of Boy would know that and go after a Bad Girl Who Deserves It.¹ It's a catch-22, because simply being assaulted makes you a Bad Girl. There's no escape, culturally.

The problem with telling women that it's their responsibility to fix things, leaving aside the idea that this is a deeply gendered view endemic in our culture, is that this instruction basically guarantees the perpetuation of the status quo, because this is something that women can't fix.

Let's look at an example I was given recently:

A man is walking down a street at night. There is a woman walking ahead of him. In order to make her feel safe, he slows down and gives her plenty of space. He may cross the street so she'll feel like he's not following her.

Why, the person I was talking to asked me, can't he catch up to her and say hi? Why can't he walk at a normal speed on the side of the street he always would? Shouldn't the burden be on her to feel secure at night on a dark street simply because violent stranger rapes are such a tiny fraction of overall rapes?

And I gave him the numbers: there's a 1 in 6 chance that woman (1 in 4 if she's a college student) has already been raped. She fears because she knows what she fears. Even if that woman is in the majority and has never been raped, she's almost certainly been harassed, catcalled, maybe groped by strangers. She may have been fondled on the bus, or stalked by an ex-boyfriend. She has a reasonable fear, despite the low rate of violent stranger rapes, that anyone on the street could be a member of that admittedly small group, and she has no way of knowing what would set him off. And the numbers, I think, speak for themselves. Yes, violent stranger rapes are a minority. But they are a minority over which women feel no sense of control.²

And so we get to the basic problem with telling women to fix the culture by acting as though it's already fixed: the price for being wrong is quite simply too high for most women to even contemplate. Women who behave as though the world is fundamentally an okay place to be a woman sometimes pay with their lives. And we all know it.

So what's the solution? I wish I knew. What I do know is that the solution will be slow in coming, because it is a fundamental sickness of our culture, not a single monolithic problem. You cannot simply find the rape tree and chop it down. It's an invasive vine. You can gain the illusion of control over it by yanking the starts when you see them, but it propagates underground, in the deepest fabric of our culture and in every individual's unconscious, and only concerted, determined, and long-term efforts can eradicate it. There's a word: eradication.

You cannot just stop it, you have to yank it out by the roots, and that takes time. It may take a fundamental restructuring of our culture. I see that restructuring starting to happen already; the things that women twenty years older than me took for granted are horrifying to people a little younger than me. We talk about rape now, and about rape as something other than violent stranger rape; I see that as a positive step. You can't address a problem until it's okay to talk about it--and we're getting there. The very fact that we can have a discussion on LJ in which people talk about their experiences and their anger in posts that aren't f-locked--in which women and men feel okay about exposing their status as survivors of rape--says to me that the situation is starting to shift to a place from which we can make real differences. Try not to be too angry that it's not happening quickly enough. This was never going to happen quickly. The key is to make the juggernaut so unstoppable that when culture throws itself under the wheels, culture is crushed as the juggernaut rumbles on.

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1. Cf. e.g., the rules for horror movies: you only survive if you're a virgin.

2. The sense of control that women feel over acquaintance rape is illusory at best (ask twenty women if they've been raped; ask the five that say yes if they thought that the man who raped them was a danger before the rape was already in progress--I think some of you will be surprised) but it is there. We have a sense that we "can tell" if a guy is going to be That Guy. Even though a significant fraction of the time we're wrong.

Being a Kansan expat means that you sometimes have to try to explain things that other Kansans have done. Mostly these are just stupid things (cf., e.g., the teaching of "creation science" in primary and secondary school science classes). Sometimes these are terrible things.

I'd imagine that, as the news trickles onto the Canadian media, I'm going to get a few questions from friends: "You're from Kansas, hey? So what about that doctor?"

And what do I say to those people? The simple answer never suffices: "There are evil people in the world. Some of them are in Kansas, and because Kansas is what it is, this is sometimes the form their evil takes: in the name of life, they terrorise the living. And sometimes they kill people, to show that killing people is wrong."

Maybe my answer is too simplistic, but it's the one I've got. Dr Tiller was a man who, in teeth of daily opposition of a kind that most of us will never experience even once in our lives, went to work every day and helped people. I have a friend whose life he saved when an allergic reaction to a bee sting later nearly turned to meningitis. Some of the people he helped, he helped by giving them access to a medical procedure that also happens to be controversial. That doesn't mean these women weren't helped. The ones who later regret their decision and wish that their free choice had been prevented legislatively or by someone not themselves, that they had been presented with, not a choice, but some inexorable fate, well... They think now that they'd be better off. Some of them might be. Many of them wouldn't. Generally speaking when a woman makes the choice to terminate a pregnancy she's not doing it lightly. Doctors like Dr Tiller know that. They know that some of the people they help will hate them for it. They know that some of the people they help will be back protesting the next week, because "the only moral abortion is my abortion". And these doctors keep helping people, because it's what they do.

Until, that is, some random shithead from Merriam, Kansas--a township where I do my Kansas grocery shopping, go to the movies, go out to dinner--guns them down in the lobby of the Lutheran church they've been a member of for dog's years, and then drives back to Kansas City doubtless pleased with a job well done: the murder of an actual living breathing adult human, who heals people for a living. Dr Tiller took over his father's practice when a plane crash killed his father, mother, and sister, along with the local university football team. I wonder who will take over his practice, and continue providing medical care to the people--particularly the women--of Wichita.

It's an intentional war of attrition, you know: selective violence on meaningful places and key persons in order to, first, deny people access to the places and convince individuals to leave the affected class of persons, and second, to frighten the population and change legal behaviours. We have a word for that. We call it terrorism. I devoutly hope that Dr Tiller's murderer is punished appropriately for the magnitude of his crime.

Now, people have said, concerning the Open Source Boob Project, that it was non-sexual and empowering, that no one was stigmatized for not participating, and that it was wonderful and the heavens opened up and spat forth flying unicorns pooping rainbows and in the Congo people put down their arms and, in some cases, other people's arms, and a shipment of rice arrived to the starving in Mali, and it was so awesome they decided to do it again except with buttons so that people could ignore them and ask you anyway if you minded having your breasts fondled by random strangers, or if you were instead a frigid prude. (Yes, this is not an entirely fair summation; deal.)

And I read about it and was pretty upset. It took me a couple of tries to get through the original, unamended LJ entry about it, because I kept imagining my nineteen-year-old self in that hallway and feeling sick. And, because I am an observant participant of this culture, and have been a participant in subcultures similar to fandom, I could pretty confidently project the arc of this little "project" through the subculture, and its spread to allied subcultures, and then I felt really sick, because part of my problem with the "project" is that it makes explicit and manifest some pretty sexist and misogynist threads that already run through these subcultures, and through the dominant culture that I live in. It's supposed to challenge ideas about touch between consenting adults...by letting men touch women's breasts. The window dressing of women also touching women, and women touching men's asses, which are not comparable to breasts when it comes to stranger-groping, aside (and you had better believe there are a hell of a lot of women that I don't want touching my breasts), this is just the same old shit. It doesn't even have new justifications or rationalizations--it's the same crap that was going on when I was nineteen: let us touch you, aren't you proud of your body, are you a prude, are you frigid?

If you want to change the paradigm, the first thing you have to do is stop reinforcing the old one, and in that sense, nothing that involves men groping women's breasts is going to do anything except end up with more women being groped in an only marginally consensual fashion.

And yeah, I have baggage about this--I freely admit it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one, and there are going to keep on being young women who grow up to be older women with terrible memories of this kind of shit if we, as a culture, as subcultures, don't cut it the fuck out.

You can experience comforting touch from me without putting your hands on my breasts, you know. I can hold your hand, or you can touch my arm, or we can, if you're not a total skeeze, hug. Maybe I can braid your hair or rub your scalp or give you a little neckrub, if you ask and I'm in the mood. Maybe we can sit side by side on a bench with our thighs touching and watch the clouds. If you want non-sexual touch, try wanting to hang out with me, and then maybe try wanting to touch me somewhere that doesn't turn you--or me--on.

Because that's the thing, of course. I'm not a cipher--I too have feelings, and if I am accustomed to finding a hand on my breast exciting, there's nothing wrong with that, and if I want to only have on my breast the hands of people that I feel comfortable responding sexually to, there's also nothing wrong with that. I'm not inappropriately sexualizing my breasts, I am acknowledging that I often find someone touching my breasts to be arousing, and that as a result, I want to be picky about who gets to touch them. I am also acknowledging that, for many people who are attracted to women, touching a woman's breasts is arousing, and while I can't stop you from having your own little Moment across the room as you mentally undress me, I can stop you from imposing your unwanted and unwelcome Moment on me and my anatomy.

And what you should acknowledge, before you ask, is that this question you're about to ask is, of itself, culturally loaded, intrusive, and open to misunderstanding--or even perfect understanding, for some of the people asking. Some people are likely to be offended, and it doesn't mean that they are sex-negative, that they are ashamed of their bodies, that they are prudish or unenlightened, frigid, virgins, lesbians. It doesn't mean that they're offended because you're not rich enough or cute enough or because they think that you are a tool of the patriarchy. It's entirely possible that they just think you're a tool. And it's entirely possible that they're right.