A Victory and a Douchebag

Ok so this is old news by now, but a couple weeks ago the Obama administration succeeded in making it law that all insurance companies must cover the entire cost of birth control, including Plan B! Yay!!! When this goes into affect it will help millions of women who have had difficulty accessing reproductive health care because of high-cost co-pays take control over their reproductive lives.

Planned Parenthood was so excited they made a Bollywood-style dance routine video about it, including dancing birth control! This is both called for, and hilarious.

Awesome right? Well one of my Arizonan "friends" on facebook posted this video, stated he didn't know "whether to laugh or cry," and called the woman wearing the birth control suit a "dike." (Jeez at least spell it right when you're being offensive!!) 

1. Why the fuck would anyone cry about this? If you followed women's health policy in this country for 2 SECONDS you would realize that good things in the news are very few and far between, so when there's something to celebrate, those of us who give a shit about these things celebrate HARD. and sometimes with costumes. 

2. You're calling her a "dike" (lol) because she has short hair. There's nothing else to indicate that she might be a woman who loves women in this video, whatsoever. In fact she makes flirty faces and gestures towards the MALE dancers. So you're basing your assumption that she's a lesbian on looks alone. This is prejudice, and it perpetuates stereotypes about lesbians, and about women with short hair. It is sexist as well as heterosexist, because it perpetuates the notion that women who deviate from the heteronormative "ideal" in terms of appearance must be gay, the idea that if your hair is shorter than shoulder length you are trying to be masculine and are therefore a man-hating bulldyke. This constrains free expression through appearance for women, perpetuates the societal tropes that leave women who step even slightly outside the box of what is considered "feminine" open to attack, and validates those attacks as acceptable. 

3. You don't get to call anyone a dyke, no matter what they look like. If that woman was black and you said, "why'd they make the n***** be the birth control?" that would extremely offensive. No one in their right mind would argue that is wasn't. Maybe if you were black, it would be more of a gray area. But you are not black, and you are not a lesbian. You are a white straight heterosexual cis-gendered male. Sorry, just because you think you're all that and a case of PBR, doesn't mean you get to co-opt language that people like you have used to oppress others, regardless of whether some of the people who were oppressed by it have decided to make it their own. You just don't get to fucking say it, ok? 

I hate when stupid thoughtlessly hateful shit comes up on my newsfeed. And this from a dude who is educated, who has traveled the world, who is supposedly "liberal." That's the worst kind of racist/sexist/heterosexist- the kind who claims to be super fucking worldly. You know what, I'm going to co-opt the term RINO- I'm making it Radical In Name Only.

anyway..

YAY FREE BIRTH CONTROL!!!!!!!! I think I'll do my own little dance about it..

<-- me dancing. 

Here's a feministing article about the new law.