Taking a Dim View - How the Women of The View Get It Wrong - Part I

I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about Who’s Who in Washington. They follow the devious paths of Washington officials in a way that I’d never have been able to track myself. The women also dish on aspects of popular culture and celebrity scandal that likely touch on personal issues affecting many viewers.

However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. Often, these blind spots are the result of their unquestioning acceptance of prevailing political philosophy, or of their partially unconscious acceptance of the current dictates of political correctness. These lapses in the women’s conversation often leave me with a trailing sadness. There’s so much more that could be said, that should be said – but that now gets smothered in the fog of political cliché.

The women of The View aren’t the only ones who suffer from tunnel vision. Oprah and her guests, and in fact the casts of most talk shows are almost all similarly limited. But The View provides the handiest current example of shallow political platitude.

In the following essay I point out one of the issues that leave the women blank on a number of points. That’s the issue of abortion. I’ll follow with a couple of other essays dealing with other issues where I feel something significant gets left out of their considerations. In all these instances, I wish the women of The View had taken a larger view.

In discussing abortion rights, a majority of the panel felt that women owned their bodies and should therefore have complete say over what to do with those bodies. These panel members believed that laws restricting women’s right to have abortions were patent sexism, the kind of gender bias that gets directed solely against women. One member of the panel posed the question, “Can you think of any instance in U.S. history in which legislation was passed dictating what MEN should do with their bodies?” The women looked at each other, for once silenced and stumped in unison. No one could think of any legislation that had ever affected men’s rights over their bodies, especially over their reproductive rights.

Well, one could get technical and say that almost all laws dictate what men and women can do with their bodies. For example, the most basic laws against committing murder dictate that you cannot hold a loaded gun in your hand, extend your arm, point the gun at some unsuspecting person’s back, and intentionally flex your fingers in such a way that you pull the trigger of the gun. But I know that’s not what the women meant.

However, even when one sticks to the spirit of the question the women were asking, their inability to come up with a single example of men being told what to do with their bodies shows some real lacunae in their knowledge and thinking.

There have been very specific laws passed that included men in their specifications regarding reproductive rights. The notorious sterilization laws that many States enacted in the early part of the 1900’s, and that were sometimes enforced through the 1970’s and 1980’s, certainly represent an interference with both men’s and women’s control over their own bodies.

These laws were enacted as the result of a nation-wide (and indeed world-wide) enthusiasm for the principles of eugenics. Following in the wake of the “survival of the fittest” interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, many eugenics societies formed to advocate compulsory sterilization of the feeble-minded, the criminally inclined, the chronically ill, the chronically shiftless and unemployed, and also of unwanted immigrants as well as of unwanted aboriginals. Wikipedia presents a good summary of the history of “Eugenics in the United States.” There it tells how:

“In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead… The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v Bell, upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.”

Even so generally humanist a jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes supported the Virginia sterilization law, famously asserting “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And so Carrie Buck was sterilized.

One can see the irony of these shifting attitudes towards abortion. The eugenics laws were aimed at preventing births (through enforced sterilizations and abortions), while modern laws are tending to require all pregnant women to give birth. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Enthusiasm for the eugenics laws waned somewhat in the U.S. in the 1940s when people became aware that the principles behind eugenics had been central to Nazi philosophy and lay at the base of the extermination of six million people. However, Buck v Bell has never been overturned, and instances of enforced sterilizations continued until quite recently.

It’s true that many more women than men were sterilized under these laws. Some of this was due to raw sexism. It stemmed from a Jack the Ripper-style abhorrence of “promiscuous women” and a barely concealed intent to punish them. But also, the fact that more women were sterilized than men often had to do with simple calculations of population control. It’s women’s fertility that is the determining factor in how many babies will be born.

Nevertheless, of the 64,000+ individuals forced to be sterilized or sterilized without sufficiently informed consent - at least several thousand were men. And in theory, the laws were generally written to apply to men and women equally. This is a significant chapter in American history that the women of The View seemed strangely ignorant of when they couldn’t think of a single instance when laws were enacted impinging on men’s control over their bodies and their ability to procreate.

There was a still larger blind spot in the women’s overview of American history though. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the question on every young man’s mind was whether or not his “number would be called.” Almost every young man was on tenterhooks. Would he be drafted to go to Viet Nam? Would he be required to expose himself to being maimed or killed in a foreign jungle? I would call any draft a very definite legislative impingement on men’s ability to do what they wanted with their bodies. How could The View women forget about that?

Getting back to the question of how strict anti-abortion laws unequally oppress women though – The View panel consistently fails to consider the obverse of that point. In virtually all countries that have more liberal abortion laws, that is, in countries that allow abortions under a wide range of circumstances – the fetuses that get disproportionately aborted are female fetuses. There is still a virtually universal preference for male babies. The result of the “one couple, one baby” policy that prevailed in China has been widely publicized. When a woman gave birth to a female child, that child was often put up for adoption, or, more brutally, was left to die by the roadside or was covertly killed outright at the moment she appeared. Ahem, another still birth, miscarriage, etc. These erasures allowed couples to try again and hope for the better luck of a male child the next time.

As it became possible to more readily determine the sex of a baby in utero, it was overwhelmingly females who were aborted. But that is true even in Western countries that are considered to be past such obvious sexism. Doctors in Britain report that when, after an ultra-sound, a woman requests an abortion – it is more often than not a female who gets aborted.

So in a way that the women of The View don’t probe deeply enough to consider – it’s a no-win situation for women. If most abortions are outlawed, women are forced to have children they neither want nor can afford. But if abortions are readily available, it’s disproportionately females who are denied life.

There are still a few other crucial points that are rarely taken into account as talk show panel members ping-pong the same old clichés about abortion – women’s rights; the right to life; women’s rights; the right to life…. I discussed one of these other ignored aspects of the debate in my previous Blog post entitled “The False Premise of the Abortion Debate.” The point of that essay was that while many are insisting on women’s right to have abortions, they neglect to consider ways in which women might be given the precedent right not to have sex. In that previous Blog, I maintained that most women usually don’t feel such a compelling urge to have sex, that they must have it NOW, no matter what the consequences.

Contrary to the way in which women are portrayed in the movies, most often women are not so urgently desirous that they have to rip off their partner’s clothes as soon as they get in the door. This is a far bigger misrepresentation of women’s true feelings than the often-cited Victorian assumption that women were naturally reticent. The truth is that women most often have sex only in order to accommodate men’s urgency. A woman has sex in hopes of “keeping” her man, of bonding him to her so that deeper feelings might have time to flourish. If women had their way, if they had just their own wishes to consider - they would tend to have sex only if and when they were ready to accept that a child might be the result. However, as a practical matter, women aren’t given that right to say “NO” to sex, and few people are currently working to give them, not so much that right, but that ability, in the course of ordinary romantic relationships.

Then there is still another aspect of the abortion debate that the women of The View fail to consider. Most “Right to Choose” advocates talk about how women should be allowed to “own their bodies.” But this idea of ownership is disturbing. In most modern liberal contexts, ownership has come to have some negative connotations. It’s usually supposed that one can only rightly own a thing, not a person. What made slavery especially abhorrent was that it necessarily made things out of the actual human beings who were being bought, sold, and owned. It reduced human beings to mere items of inventory.

If one considers that ownership can only be exercised on a “thing,” it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about owning other people – or yourself. Both should be seen as equally repugnant.

Many individuals are now calling for reconsidering that usage even as it applies to animals, plants, and all the earth’s resources. The rise of factory farming makes it especially apparent how depreciating the concept of ownership can be. Creatures who should rightfully be treated with respect, with an awareness of and a sense of awe at the singular, miraculous life force that fills them – are instead brutalized and considered only as commodities under the farm’s regime of ownership.

Those who are fighting for reform of the factory farm system often point to the traditional Native American philosophy as an example of how life and all of earth’s resources should be regarded. Native Americans did not strictly apply the concept of ownership to the animals they hunted for food, or to the land’s bounty in general. White people’s attempts to enforce the concept of private ownership on them were perhaps responsible, more than any other depredations, for disorienting and dispiriting the Native American population. The modern idea that each individual should own himself or herself would have been even more profoundly alienating to Native Americans.

But aside from this broadly problematic application of the term “ownership,” it should also be remembered that ownership doesn’t mean one can do exactly as one wishes with one’s property. The “Right to Choose” faction of the abortion debate seems to imply that by granting women the right to claim ownership over their own bodies, the women can be granted total freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. But ownership almost never grants any such carte blanche. Indeed, ownership of something usually carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility, restriction, and broad conservatorship. The owner of an apartment building can’t deny African Americans the right to rent there based on their race; the owner of a chemical factory can’t dump toxic waste, even on company property. Just because you own something doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it – and that includes your own body.

There’s one further aspect of the idea that each of us owns our bodies that actually flies against enlightened philosophy. Such a concept of ownership evokes the old Cartesian dualism that modern science has larger discredited. By saying “I own my body,” you imply that there are two separate entities involved in your personhood. There is an immaterial mind controlling a material corpus. There is the owner and the owned inhabiting you. Who is this owner, the one who assumes such haughty proprietorial rights?

Contrary to the idea that there is such a schism constituting each of us, now most science falls on the side of there being only one unified entity comprising each of us, and that entity is an interactive physical network. The processes that give rise to all thoughts, including thoughts each person has about his or her own identity - are chemical, electrical processes at work in a real, material substrate. The person and the thought are one. We are all both indivisibly the singer and the song.

It’s true that these metaphysical considerations might seem to be a bit rarified for daytime TV. Talk shows are meant to be entertaining as well as informative. But the women of The View do audiences a disservice by ignoring these aspects of the abortion debate altogether. The truth is – men have been legally denied control over reproductive capacity and over their lives as a whole. Ready access to abortions can work against the interests of females. Pregnancies are more the result of men’s urgency than of women’s real desires, with the latter being subordinated once again. By trapping women into adopting the idea of a robber baron’s right of ownership - they are being trapped into a limiting falsehood.

This is just one of the issues on which talk shows fall short of taking a larger view. In a couple of follow-up essays, I’ll cite other ways in which I wish talk shows would step outside the box of the usual political cliché and open the discussion to wider, wilder fields of thought.

Born to Lose - Factory Farms

The other day, I went on a tour of Fair Oaks Farms, a large dairy complex about 45 miles from me in Indiana. Fair Oaks is a popular tourist destination. It has been inviting the public in to look at its operation since 2005. Catering to day-trippers, it features all sorts of family-friendly exhibits, a bus tour, a gift shop/cafeteria, etc.

I incidentally belong to a local watchdog group concerned with the welfare of farm animals. This group tries to mitigate the worst practices of "factory farms." So when I went to Fair Oaks, I was prepared to take notes to report back to F.A.C.T. about conditions there. Since the dairy opens itself to the public though, I presumed I would not be seeing any atrocities committed against the cows there.

And indeed, the farm did look humane. The cows weren't "free range." I'm told that sort of freedom is virtually non-existent in the world of dairy farming, especially since the bacterial dangers of cattle associating on grazing land have been brought home to everyone. However the cows were "free-stall." That is, they were not tethered to small, assigned stalls. They were free to move around within the long barns where they were housed. Each cow could choose its own sand bed, get up and go to the water trough, visit neighbors, etc. This was OK - but still, there were a lot of cows in each barn and there wasn't much room for them to move or socialize. But the cows did look generally clean and content, although rather thin, with hipbones showing. (The tour moderator explained that most of the cows' weight went into their udders and milk production. They weren't genetically prone to accumulating beef fat around their haunches.)

Our tour guide pointed out all the effort that had gone into making the farm “green.” By-products were recycled. For example, the cows’ manure went to make fertilizer. The methane produced by the cows’ digestive process was used as fuel to produce the electricity that ran significant portions of the operation.

We wore 3-D glasses to watch an instructional film showing an overview of the whole corn-to-cow-to café au lait process. Well, “instructional film” might not be quite the word for this video that we were all herded in to watch in the theater of the main building. That phrase harkens back to the black-and-white talking heads films that served school children of the 1950’s as visual aids. This film was another animal altogether. It was more of an MTV-style video featuring a barrage of special effects and quick cuts.

In addition to its moderators being teenagers giving Bill Nye Science Guy-style goofy, gushy blurbs about each step of the operation – there was Sensorama connected to the pictures. Each member of the audience felt the warm breezes that fanned the cows in their free-stall barns. Each member of the audience got a squirt in the face when old-fashioned manual milking technique was demonstrated, by way of contrast with the farm’s modern, automated milking go-rounds. An udder was pointed at us, and – spritz! We all got a spray of what I presume was water in our faces. Then again as grand finale, the animated cow on screen turned its back to us, and looking mischievously over its shoulder, let loose with a spritz from its hinder orifice. Again, I presume it was water that sprinkled us from the rafters in synchrony with this rascally scatology. To keep with the cow-herd-udder theme, I might say that titters in the audience swoll into general guffawing hilarity as the cow lined up on us a second time. Would it let loose again? Suspense - squeals of anticipation – watch out!

As we trooped out, returning our 3-D glasses to a bin, we were a jostling, merry bunch. The picture presented had been one of such jolly benignity. Then I went into the birthing barn. It was here that I felt the undertow of tragedy to this whole operation.

The dairy had two straw-covered birthing rooms with glass fronts, so the viewing public could get a good look at calves being born. (Everything on view was behind glass throughout the complex. The visiting public was never allowed to interact with or step close to any animal - again for fear of contamination. ) The dual compartment birthing room was "a clean, well-lighted place,” to use Hemingway’s foreshadowing title.

One Holstein had just given birth when I arrived. She was licking off her calf. After about 10 minutes, the calf could already stand, although feebly. An attendant came in and gave the calf colostrum from a milk bottle, then ushered it out of the room - partly leading it, then loading it into a wheelbarrow and carting it the rest of the way to its individual large doghouse-like room retreat in calf-quarters. I wondered why the calf hadn’t been allowed to suckle from its mother.

Another Holstein in the other section of the birthing room finally sprawled to give birth lying down. Two legs emerged from her birth canal, and then things seemed to stop. After about 20 minutes, that same attendant donned up-to-her-biceps-length plastic gloves, reached in, and helped ease the calf forward in the birth canal. (It was like an illustration of what James Herriot had described so often in his books about being a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930’s.)

After receiving that helping hand, the calf soon popped completely out of the birth canal. It was a bit smaller, more beleaguered-looking than the other calf I had just seen. At first we all thought it was dead. It just lay in the hay, a somewhat sweaty, bloody heap. But then in a few seconds, it stirred, then raised its head, then tried to struggle to its feet. It was alive! We all cheered.

Its mother started to lick it. Another Holstein who’d been led into the adjoining stall still in the early, standing stages of her labor - stuck her head between the railings separating the compounds, and started to help lick the newborn. The two females made a friendly communal project of the baby.

Having now seen the whole cycle of birth, from early contractions through to successful baby in the manger, many of us started to leave, to go back to the gift shop and our buses. We were all happy that things did indeed seem to be so cheerful and humane throughout.

But I stopped a moment to talk further to the attendant. I asked when that first calf would be brought back to its mother to suckle. The attendant said, "Oh, never. They will never see each other again."

I gasped and looked over at the other calf, a little male, still being licked by its mother and the other cow.

"That one too?"

The calf doula nodded. "Yes, that one will also get taken away in a few minutes. Since it's a male, it will probably be sold in a week - for veal.”

"But isn't that separation psychologically difficult for mother and child?" I asked plaintively.

“No, it’s not tough on the animals - not really. That’s the way it is,” she said. “The calf doesn't know any better - and the mothers are used to it. They just know - they give birth - and the baby is taken. They're used to it," she repeated.

Her words were meant to be reassuring. But I saw her eyes mist over, and then an actual tear rolled down her cheek. That little male she had just helped bring into the world was destined to have a very short life indeed. She had apparently failed to convince even herself with her repeated reassurance that the animals “didn’t mind.”

For all the clean hay and fresh water and bright, cheery lights - this was a business, geared to meet our huge, indifferent demands for more milk, more meat, more everything. Like most production in this atmosphere, it necessarily had to be mass-production. Keep things moving - efficiency – assembly line - a factory after all.