Gabrielle Blair’s Twitter Thread is Powerful and Inspiring and Dangerously Mostly Wrong

It’s a free country, and everyone has a right to their opinion, and that’s healthy. But the freedom to discuss these opinions without backlash is also important, and it saddens me when counter positions to virally popular opinions are subjugated out of fear of retribution from the outrage mob. A pristine example of that is going on right now with Gabrielle Blair’s popular series of tweets.

If you’re reading this article at all, then it’s very likely you’ve already read Gabrielle Blair’s twitter thread about men bearing 100% of the responsibility for unwanted pregnancies. If you don’t like Twitter as a form of communication (I don’t, I think it’s garbage) she also reposted it on her blog.

One of the main problems with this article is it pushes some alarmingly false and damaging narratives about men’s health, which is a very irresponsible thing to do in reaction to certain Red Tribers pushing false or damaging narratives about women’s health. But a bigger issue, in my mind, is the entire thing is written from the presumption of complete or near complete lack of agency of women. Feminism should be based around the strength of women, and women asserting their own personal agency, which they do have. Strength and personal agency are the correct narratives to teach our children, not indoctrinations of perpetual victimhood and blame.

Let’s run through this, so you can see what I’m talking about.

The Critique

I’m a mother of six, and a Mormon. I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise. I’ve been listening to men grandstand about women’s reproductive rights, and I’m convinced men actually have zero interest in stopping abortion. Here’s why…

If you want to stop abortion, you need to prevent unwanted pregnancies. And men are 100% responsible for unwanted pregnancies. No for real, they are. Perhaps you are thinking: IT TAKES TWO! And yes, it does take two for _intentional_ pregnancies.

But ALL unwanted pregnancies are caused by the irresponsible ejaculations of men. Period. Don’t believe me? Let me walk you through it. Let’s start with this: women can only get pregnant about 2 days each month. And that’s for a limited number of years.

That makes 24 days a year a women might get pregnant. But men can _cause_ pregnancy 365 days a year. In fact, if you’re a man who ejaculates multiple times a day, you could cause multiple pregnancies daily. In theory a man could cause 1000+ unwanted pregnancies in just one year.

And though their sperm gets crappier as they age, men can cause unwanted pregnancies from puberty till death. So just starting with basic biology + the calendar it’s easy to see men are the issue here.

Let’s examine the case of this man who causes 1000 unwanted pregnancies in a year. Presuming he’s not an intensely calculating serial rapist with a universal ovulation chart of his entire town, this hypothetical man would need three ovulating women per day to line up and agree to have consensually unprotected sex with him. There is no magic button this hypothetical man can push to force women to consent to have unprotected sex with him. They must choose to do it. Pretending they can’t choose to do it, or not do it, denies them their agency. This is a terrible message to convey to your daughters, explicitly or otherwise, and Blair repeats this terrible message implicitly throughout the article.

But what about birth control? If a woman doesn’t want to risk an unwanted pregnancy, why wouldn’t she just use birth control? If a women can manage to figure out how to get an abortion, surely she can get birth control, right? Great questions.

Modern birth control is possibly the greatest invention of the last century, and I am very grateful for it. It’s also brutal. The side effects for many women are ridiculously harmful. So ridiculous, that when an oral contraception for men was created, it wasn’t approved…

… because of the side effects. And the list of side effects was about 1/3 as long as the known side effects for women’s oral contraception.

Good gracious.

Half of this is true. Women’s birth control can have nasty side effects, and most women who opt for a daily pill end up bouncing between different ones, looking for the one that impairs them the least. I don’t like them, and if a couple can opt for different contraceptive methods, they probably should. But she’s grossly misrepresenting the results of that study. It may not be Ms. Blair’s fault, because the media did a very inaccurate portrayal of that, and the way media echo chambers work she probably never got the other (truer) half of it. It breaks down like this. The list of side effects was smaller, but the incidence rate of extreme side effects was much higher, and included chronic depression and suicide. The study authors did their best to CYA on the suicide, probably so they didn’t get sued, but let’s look specifically at that for a moment.

The male birth control shot was a cocktail of testosterone and progesterone, which are steroidal hormones which impact mood. Testosterone is the hormone which anabolic steroids simulate, and testosterone mood swings are not weepy, they’re violent. Hence the term “Roid Rage.” Even men on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) sometimes experience “Jekyll and Hyde” episodes of aggression, which their spouses must adjust to. There’s even a push to ban police from using it.

Progesterone is a hormone in women related to their reproductive cycle and their libido. It’s proscribed for menopause, and many reproductive issues, including female birth control. But it’s also the primary hormonal driver of the depression and anxiety women feel during PMS. The “male pill” hormone cocktail was an injected blend of PMS and Roid Rage. They’re probably lucky they only had one suicide during the trial, given that men are three and a half times more likely than women to kill themselves.

I hope I’m not going out on a limb, here, but I think I can file: “gosh I wish my husband was moodier, more violent, and more suicidal” among the phrases I will never hear a woman say.

Let’s move on.

There’s a lot to be unpacked just in that story, but I’ll simply point out (in case you didn’t know) that as a society, we really don’t mind if women suffer, physically or mentally, as long as it makes things easier for men.

I don’t know any men who believe this, nor any women who believe this, and “society” is just a collection of men and women. But society is pretty big, so it’s possible that the men around her believe this. I will grant there may be some cloister of men who want women to suffer for their own ease, but I can guarantee any woman reading this article that this is not universally the case. If you find yourself mired in such a cloister where men want women to suffer for their own ease, you should move. Find new friends or something. Switch religions. Most of the country isn’t this way.

But good news, Men: Even with the horrible side effects, women are still very willing to use birth control. Unfortunately it’s harder to get than it should be. Birth control options for women require a doctor’s appointment and a prescription. It’s not free, and often not cheap.

In fact there are many people trying to make it more expensive by fighting to make sure insurance companies refuse to cover it. Oral contraceptives for women can’t be acquired easily, or at the last minute. And they don’t work instantly.

If we’re talking about the pill, it requires consistent daily use and doesn’t leave much room for mistakes, forgetfulness, or unexpected disruptions to daily schedules. And again, the side effects can be brutal. I’M STILL GRATEFUL FOR IT PLEASE DON’T TAKE IT AWAY.

I’m just saying women’s birth control isn’t simple or easy. In contrast, let’s look at birth control for men, meaning condoms. Condoms are readily available at all hours, inexpensive, convenient, and don’t require a prescription. They’re effective, and work on demand, instantly.

Men can keep them stocked up just in case, so they’re always prepared. Amazing! They are so much easier than birth control options for women. As a bonus, in general, women love when men use condoms. They keep us from getting STDs, they don’t lessen our pleasure during sex…

… or prevent us from climaxing. And the best part? Clean up is so much easier — no waddling to the toilet as your jizz drips down our legs. So why in the world are there ever unwanted pregnancies? Why don’t men just use condoms every time they have sex? Seems so simple, right?

I’m good with all of this. All birth control methods should be over the counter, with the greatest possible barrier simply a pharmacist consultation. The FDA should fast-track generics for all of them, which would make them all much cheaper (possibly five times cheaper). Our major barriers here are FDA approval, pharmaceutical patent law, and AMA obstructionism. And yeah, condoms are great.

Oh. I remember. Men _don’t_ love condoms. In fact, men frequently pressure women to have sex without a condom. And it’s not unheard of for men to remove the condom during sex, without the women’s permission or knowledge. (Pro-tip: That’s assault.)

Why would men want to have sex without a condom? Good question. Apparently it’s because for the minutes they are penetrating their partner, having no condom on gives the experience more pleasure.

So… there are men willing to risk getting a woman pregnant — which means literally risking her life, her health, her social status, her relationships, and her career, so that they can experience a few minutes of _slightly_ more pleasure? Is that for real? Yes. Yes it is.

Holy shit, is this real? How real is it? I follow the HuffPo link, and wow, ok, that’s real apparently, but how common is it? Prevalence rates are not mentioned in HuffPo, or in the twitter thread, so off we go to do more research.

This is apparently called “pregnancy coercion,” and the term applies to when men or women lie about, or sabotage, birth control. A 2015 paper by Rachel Camp at Georgetown is a pretty good overview of it, with some prevalence numbers.

The first question: How many men refuse to practice birth control up-front? According to the paper, one in ten women (10%) report they have had an intimate partner who either (A) tried to get them pregnant when they didn’t want to be, or (B) refused to practice some kind of birth control method when asked to do so. So now we have a literal number to attach to “#notallmen” — 90% of men are good, “responsible ejaculators” as Blair puts it, right? Actually, no, it’s much higher than that. Since a single man who categorically refuses to practice birth control can have sex with multiple women, and only 10% of women report having sex with men like that, some of those women shared an experience with other women within that 10% pool. The actual number of men who refuse to practice birth control is somewhere south of that number. How far south?

There’s math for that.

The average woman has had sex with about seven men, according to the Journal of Sex Research. Let’s optimistically presume that these birth-control-refusing men aren’t any more attractive mates than other men. If we randomly select a pool of women who have had seven sexually intimate relationships with a pool of men populated by 1.5% birth control refusers, 10% of those women will have paired up at some point with a birth control refuser.

So those are the men Blair is railing against. 1.5% of men.

Is this “mansplaining?” Quite the opposite. It’s mathsplaining. One of the most attractive features of mathematics is that it gives you the same answer no matter which gender does the math. Which is a great reason more people should start using it.

What about the much worse thing, the “stealthing” thing, where men take the condom off half way through? The same Georgetown study indicates that among women who called domestic abuse hotlines, 16% reported that their partners actually removed condoms during sex. There’s a selection bias issue going on here, in that near 100% of the women who call domestic abuse hotlines are in relationships with giant steaming jerks, so we know that the real number of men doing this “stealthing” thing is way lower than 16%. Way lower than 1.5% if you believe the mathematics above.

Let’s pretend that 10% of women nationwide have called the domestic abuse hotline. At an average of seven partners, the same math works from above. That would mean that the number of Uber Jerks who do this stealthing thing is (16% times 1.5%), or 2.4 men per 1000. If a woman had sex with a different man every day for fourteen months straight, she’d probably have sex with one of these guys. That’s a sloppy number, because we don’t have good data on the prevalence of domestic hotline abuse. If you’re in the media, don’t repost it. Do your own homework.

It’s still a bad thing that women should absolutely be concerned about, but everyone needs to understand that it’s exceedingly rare.

Here’s another interesting quote from that study:

A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control of 23,000 men and women eighteen or older, found that more men than women were coerced into pregnancy. Specifically, the CDC’s survey found that 10.4% of men surveyed, as compared to 8.6% of women, reported ever having an intimate partner who tried to get them pregnant when they did not want to, or refused to use a condom.

What’s interesting here, is that we see a comparison between the number of women trying to get pregnant without their partner’s consent, versus the number of men trying to get a woman pregnant without their partner’s consent. The numbers are pretty close. And that opens a very sticky topic, with views on both sides, which go like this:

Male pregnancy coercion is worse than female pregnancy coercion because the female is the one that gets pregnant. She’s saddled with carrying the baby, there are medical dangers, and the 18-year obligation in time and money.

This is a good, solid case.

..versus..

Female pregnancy coercion is worse than male pregnancy coercion because the woman has the ability to opt out, via abortion. A man coerced into conceiving a child literally has no legal option but to pay child support for 18 years, to say nothing about socially obligated marriages. It’s a trap, and the law in the USA and Canada aids and abets this trap. I’m afraid to say that this is also a good, solid case.

Both sides have valid points, and there’s no good way to decide which is “worse” without trying to plug all the horrible shit bound up in each case into some kind of mathematical-decision-matrix-of-suck, which I’m not going to do. So instead, I and most people I know in real life simply default to “both of these things are horrible.” Thankfully, they are not the norm. Everyone should be very wary of this crap, both men and women, but nobody should formulate their world view as if an entire gender is out to get them.

What are we talking about here pleasure-wise? If there’s a pleasure scale, with pain beginning at zero and going down into the negatives, a back-scratch falling at 5, and an orgasm without a condom being a 10, where would sex _with_ a condom fall? Like a 7 or 8?

So it’s not like sex with a condom is _not_ pleasurable, it’s just not _as_ pleasurable. An 8 instead of a 10. Let me emphasize that again: Men regularly choose to put women at massive risk by having non-condom sex, in order to experience a few minutes of slightly more pleasure.

Now keep in mind, for the truly condom-averse, men also have a non-condom, always-ready birth control built right in, called the pull out. It’s not perfect, and it’s a favorite joke, but it is also 96% effective.

So surely, we can expect men who aren’t wearing a condom to at least pull out every time they have sex, right?

FREEZE.

Woah there.

Onanism is great, and I’m a fan. But there’s some more “men’s health physiology” Blair is missing here, that’s actually quite damaging to women when she pushes this. When a man climaxes, the final two or three seconds of the experience are so tremendous that his higher brain functions are sometimes overridden by instinct. Pulling out is not something that every man is born knowing how to do. For many men, it takes practice, and control, and the mental techniques for doing so are related in some ways to those that avoid premature ejaculation. Which is why her own link (click it above and check) states that one in five women will get pregnant trying this.

That means several things. First off, no teens should be doing this, ever. Second, no woman who seeks to avoid pregnancy should ever consent to the “pull out method” unless they’re comfortable that their partner knows how to do it, ideally by practicing first while employing a different method of birth control as a backup. For practiced, careful couples, on the other hand, this method is great, because it works very well if done properly, and it means the woman doesn’t have to undergo the drawbacks of those damn pills.

Nope.

And why not?

Well, again, apparently it’s slightly more pleasurable to climax inside a vagina than, say, on their partner’s stomach. So men are willing to risk the life, health and well-being of women, in order to experience a tiny bit more pleasure for like 5 seconds during orgasm.

It’s mind-boggling and disturbing when you realize that’s the choice men are making. And honestly, I’m not as mad as I should be about this, because we’ve trained men from birth that their pleasure is of utmost importance in the world. (And to dis-associate sex and pregnancy.)

Let’s be clear about this. What “trained” everyone, not just men, to disassociate sex from pregnancy was the sexual revolution. It was almost literally the whole point, and there’s no putting that one back in the box. It’s out there, and we all have to live with it, whether we’re Christian conservatives or angry Feminists or anything in between.

I happen to like the sexual revolution, I happen to enjoy non-procreative sex, and most of the people I know agree with me on that point, regardless of their gender.

Further, neither my spouse nor I have ever once trained our son that “his pleasure is of the utmost importance in the world,” nor do we intend to, nor does anyone I know. So here we go again.

*clears throat*

“Society” is just a collection of men and women. But society is pretty big, so it’s possible that the people around Blair believe this. I will grant there may be some cloister of people who think male pleasure is of utmost importance in the world, but I can guarantee any woman reading this article that this is not universally the case. If you find yourself mired in such a cloister where people think male pleasure is of utmost importance in the world, you should move. Find new friends or something. Switch religions. Most of the country isn’t this way.

While we’re here, let’s talk a bit more about pleasure and biology. Did you know that a man CAN’T get a woman pregnant without having an orgasm? Which means that we can conclude getting a woman pregnant is a pleasurable act for men.

But did you further know that men CAN get a woman pregnant without HER feeling any pleasure at all? In fact, it’s totally possible for a man to impregnate a woman even while causing her excruciating pain, trauma or horror.

In contrast, a woman can have non-stop orgasms with or without a partner and never once get herself pregnant. A woman’s orgasm has literally nothing to do with pregnancy or fertility — her clitoris exists not for creating new babies, but simply for pleasure.

No matter how many orgasms she has, they won’t make her pregnant. Pregnancies can only happen when men have an orgasm. Unwanted pregnancies can only happen when men orgasm irresponsibly.

What this means is a women can be the sluttliest slut in the entire world who loves having orgasms all day long and all night long and she will never find herself with an unwanted pregnancy unless a man shows up and ejaculates irresponsibly.

Women enjoying sex does not equal unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Men enjoying sex and having irresponsible ejaculations is what causes unwanted pregnancies and abortion.

While certainly this passage is strongly worded, I think it’s mostly accurate, because of the “irresponsible” caveat. Credit where it’s due, I’m right with her here, except for one thing.

I don’t understand why enjoying orgasms would make a woman a slut. I’ve never heard anyone say that, although I suppose some people might. Slut shaming is not a good look, no matter who’s doing it, a man or (in this case) a woman. Surprisingly, when you do research on the term ‘slut,’ it’s a term not infrequently used by women against other women in private. And its usage in those contexts isn’t even related to sex, it’s tied to income and social privileges. The term is a social weapon, which makes me question her motivations for using it.

Let’s talk more about responsibility. Men often don’t know, and don’t ask, and don’t think to ask, if they’ve caused a pregnancy. They may never think of it, or associate sex with making babies at all. Why? Because there are 0 consequences for men who cause unwanted pregnancies.

If the woman decides to have an abortion, the man may never know he caused an unwanted pregnancy with his irresponsible ejaculation.

This is not true in my experience. Every man I’ve ever met would want to know, and if the man doesn’t know, it’s because the woman chose not to tell him. But (here we go again) society is pretty big, so it’s possible that the men around her believe this, etc. etc. Skipping ahead.

If the woman decides to have the baby, or put the baby up for adoption, the man may never know he caused an unwanted pregnancy with his irresponsible ejaculation, or that there’s now a child walking around with 50% of his DNA.

If a woman has a man’s child and puts it up for adoption, without affording him the opportunity to take responsibility for his own child and raise it accordingly, then that woman is selfish and evil. Everyone of either gender has a right to do right by their own progeny, and every child has a right to grow up with at least one of their parents if the parent can raise them. That anyone could think differently blows my mind. It terrifies me that any women would even represent this as an option to their own daughters. If that’s feminism, count me out.

I can’t even imagine being an adopted child, being tracked down by my father years later, and explained that my mother put me up for adoption without giving my father the option to parent me.

The entire scenario tweeted out here is so thoroughly disgusting it’s hard to put into words. The only way it makes any sense, is if Blair started with the a-priori assumption that no man wants fatherhood. The fact that this tweet essay has been shared by so many people, mostly women, makes me fear that women’s opinions of men have been severely polluted somehow. It makes me wonder how. Maybe social media echo chambers and virtue signaling. More on that below.

If the woman does tell him that he caused an unwanted pregnancy and that she’s having the baby, the closest thing to a consequence for him, is that he may need to pay child support. But our current child support system is well-known to be a joke.

61% of men (or women) who are legally required to pay it, simply don’t. With little or no repercussions. Their credit isn’t even affected. So, many men keep going as is, causing unwanted pregnancies with irresponsible ejaculations and never giving it thought.

This is just a made-up number.

25.1% of custodial mothers receive no child support, while 32% of custodial fathers receive no child support. So not only is the 61% number off by a factor of two and a half, it’s slightly worse for men than women, in terms of deadbeat partners. A higher number pay some-but-not-all child support, which again is split, and again similarly not quite fair. Custodial mothers typically receive 52% of what they’re due, custodial fathers 40%. Caveat: that doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the entire issue, because custodial mothers earn less, for various reasons that are a totally separate issue.

It’s also true that men only make up 18.3% of custodial parents, but that’s not men’s doing. It’s the government’s fault, and we could go a long way to plugging that hole by more states adopting 50/50 custody as their default position. Very few do, and the ones that do, often don’t enforce it. We’d probably also go a fair way to plugging the pay gap with that, and more evenly distributing the total amount of paid (and unpaid) child support among the genders. If that were our goal, anyway.

When the topic of abortion comes up, men might think: Abortion is horrible; women should not have abortions. And never once consider the man who CAUSED the unwanted pregnancy. If you’re not holding men responsible for unwanted pregnancies, then you are wasting your time.

Stop protesting at clinics. Stop shaming women. Stop trying to overturn abortion laws. If you actually care about reducing or eliminating the number of abortions in our country, simply HOLD MEN RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

I’m with Blair here. Sounds great.

What would that look like? What if there was a real and immediate consequence for men who cause an unwanted pregnancy? What kind of consequence would make sense? Should it be as harsh, painful, nauseating, scarring, expensive, risky, and life-altering…

… as forcing a woman to go through a 9-month unwanted pregnancy?

In my experience, men really like their testicles. If irresponsible ejaculations were putting their balls at risk, they would stop being irresponsible. Does castration seem like a cruel and unusual punishment? Definitely.

But is it worse than forcing 500,000 women a year to puke daily for months, gain 40 pounds, and then rip their bodies apart in childbirth? Is a handful of castrations worse than women dying during forced pregnancy & childbirth

Put a castration law on the books, implement the law, let the media tell the story, and in 3 months or less, tada! abortions will have virtually disappeared. Can you picture it? No more abortions in less than 3 months, without ever trying to outlaw them. Amazing.

I’ll engage the embarrassingly silly thought experiment for one moment and one moment only, to point out the obvious fact that not every unwanted pregnancy is due to evil malicious men, that most (almost all?) sex acts that lead to unwanted pregnancies are consensual, that many (most?) abortions are a result of accidents in the birth control methodologies chosen by the couple, and that this nationwide castration fantasy wouldn’t affect the abortion numbers that much. This should be obvious. I’m worried that for some people it apparently isn’t.

For those of you who consider abortion to be murder, wouldn’t you be on board with having a handful of men castrated, if it prevented 500,000 murders each year?

And if not, is that because you actually care more about policing women’s bodies, morality, and sexuality, than you do about reducing or eliminating abortions? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Hey, you can even have the men who will be castrated bank their sperm before it happens — just in case they want to responsibly have kids some day.

I’ll say this on the whole abortion debate:

There are cases for it, there are cases against it, and there are cases in the middle about properly defining the viability range. The nuanced discussion is about what point in prenatal development we start granting rights to the fetus, and what those rights look like. That discussion is complicated, and nobody seems to be having it. I happen to think Roe V. Wade got this mostly right. The case against it which uses pregnancy as a “punishment for amorality” is a wretched case, and it’s easy to debunk without all this man hating silliness.

Can’t wrap your head around a physical punishment for men? Even though you seem to be more than fine with physical punishments for women? Okay. Then how about this prevention idea: At the onset of puberty, all males in the U.S. could be required by law to get a vasectomy.

Vasectomies are very safe, totally reversible, and about as invasive as an doctor’s exam for a woman getting a birth control prescription. There is some soreness afterwards for about 24 hours, but that’s pretty much it for side effects.

(So much better than The Pill, which is taken by millions of women in our country, the side effects of which are well known and can be brutal.)
If/when the male becomes a responsible adult, and perhaps finds a mate, if they want to have a baby, the vasectomy can be reversed, and then redone once the childbearing stage is over. And each male can bank their sperm before the vasectomy, just in case.

It’s not that wild of an idea. 80% of males in the U.S. are circumcised, most as babies. And that’s not reversible.

More men’s health talk. This entire passage is garbage, and I hope the women reading her piece don’t believe it. While vasectomies are somewhat reversible, the success rate can be as low as 40%, and the success rate goes down the longer you’ve had one. My family chose the vasectomy route, and we are very pleased with the results. It’s fabulous birth control. It is marginally invasive. They cut a small hole in the man’s scrotum, fish the vas deferens tubes out the hole, and burn them. The man is very sore for more like 72 hours, not 24 like Blair claims, but it’s not a huge deal. Schedule the procedure on a Friday during football season, put some beer in a cooler, ice packs. Don’t jerk off for two weeks. More affordable than birth control pills in the long run, too. But when the man goes in for one, they make him sign a waiver that says he swears he’s done making kids, because of the low success rate of the reattachment procedure.

Which, by the way, is also the reason nobody recommends for women to get their tubes tied as a temporary preventative birth control measure. Tubal ligation reversal actually has a higher success rate than vasectomy reversal does, and women with tubal ligation still have the option of IVF. Even so, nobody’s doing that to teenage girls, nor should they.

Don’t like my ideas? That’s fine. I’m sure there are better ones. Go ahead and suggest your own ideas. My point is that it’s nonsense to focus on women if you’re trying to get rid of abortions. Abortion is the “cure” for an unwanted pregnancy.

If you want to stop abortions, you need to prevent the “disease” — meaning, unwanted pregnancies.

Okay. Again, I’m right with Blair, until…

And the only way to do that, is by focusing on men, because: MEN CAUSE 100% OF UNWANTED PREGNANCIES. Or. IRRESPONSIBLE EJACULATIONS BY MEN CAUSE 100% OF UNWANTED PREGNANCIES.

And now we’re back to the main issue. Bunk statistics, junk science, slut shaming, questionable Onanism advice, and lack of understanding of male physiology aside, this is the biggest problem in this piece, because in putting 100% of the responsibility on men, it removes the women’s agency. This phrase:

“Men cause 100% of unwanted pregnancies”

…is the same thing as saying:

“Women are powerless to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.”

I can think of no worse message to teach my daughter than one of powerlessness. Feminism is supposed to be about women taking control of their own lives, bearing their own responsibilities, and exerting their own power. Which they do have. This is exactly why the birth control revolution, the sexual revolution, and feminism, were so inextricably linked.

Sex is a choice. Women have power in how that choice is made, and they can’t be shy about using that power to steer how the choice is made. It is the only way forward. We made this bed in the 1960s, and now we have to figure out how to get laid in it. We can maybe do a better job of figuring this out, but not by screaming at each other.

If she’d said “rapists are 100% to blame for unwanted pregnancies resulting from rape,” that would be accurate.

If she’d said “those psycho ‘stealthing’ men are 100% responsible for unwanted pregnancies resulting from that shit, which is by the way sexual assault,” then that would also be accurate.

And if she then also said, “…and women who lie about being on the pill to get pregnant, or who poke holes in condoms, are 100% responsible for *that* unwanted pregnancy, which by the way still counts as an unwanted pregnancy,” then that would also be accurate.

All the other unwanted pregnancies have shared blame, and shared responsibility, and shared obligation, because that’s how rights work. Rights come with responsibilities attached.

Next Blair goes into a weird food analogy that I’m going to skip, so we can get to the end, and then talk about the more interesting thing, which is the social media reaction.

Condoms (or even pulling out) is that simple thing. Don’t put women at risk. Don’t choose to maximize your own pleasure if it risks causing women pain.

Men mostly run our government. Men mostly make the laws. And men could eliminate abortions in 3 months or less without ever touching an abortion law or evening mentioning women.

In summary: STOP TRYING TO CONTROL WOMEN’S BODIES AND SEXUALITY. UNWANTED PREGNANCIES ARE CAUSED BY MEN.

For the very small subset (1.5%?) of psychotic men who simultaneously refuse to wear a condom, refuse to pull out, and refuse to adopt responsibility for the prior two refusals, she sends a strong if ill-informed message, that they need to hear and abide. They probably won’t, though, because they’re jerks.
For our (United States) government, which is a bipartisan coalition of rich rapists and rape enablers playing by completely different ethical rules than the citizenry, I think it’s safe to say they aren’t going to listen, nor do they care, unless they can virtue signal their way to a shift in the polls.

Now let’s talk about the other 98.5% of men, and the preponderance of women, who are either sharing this piece enthusiastically, or screaming behind the scenes about how garbage a piece it is but fearful to speak out against it.

The Social Media Reaction

This thing spread like wildfire through my immediate and extend social media circles, despite it being mostly wrong. “I showed this to my teen daughter!” Hopefully not the Onanism part. “I showed this to my son!” Hopefully not the vasectomy reversal part. I could see some utility in showing that article to kids, but only insomuch as it might scare the shit out of them, and there’s some admitted utility in scaring teenagers about sex.

But I can see why it got shared, and I don’t hold it against some of the people who shared it.

Some of the people sharing it probably truly believe all its unfounded claims about the world, and about men. They really aren’t going to like the critiques I present here, because those critiques challenge their world view indoctrinations. And having your indoctrinations challenged is hard. We as humans are proud of our indoctrinations, and defend them, because they make our lives easier, because they mean we don’t have to think so much. It would be nice if people thought more.

I also saw some people share it who knew its flaws. Those are more frustrating. I think many of them didn’t read it thoroughly, which shouldn’t surprise since 6 in 10 people share articles without reading them. I think some of them latched onto the article’s main drive of attacking the religious conservative position of “pregnancy as punishment” and would share any article in that box, no matter how terrible. And I think some people may have shared the article even knowing they disagreed with it, purely as a virtue signal. They shared it to be a part of the club. Hell, there were probably even be men who shared it trying to get laid.

But I saw just as much behind the scenes disagreement with the article, even among liberals, over many of the things I brought up above. What struck me as fascinating, and terrifying, was that everyone was scared to point out its flaws in public. They were afraid of being attacked by a mob. So am I, which is why I have to publish this anonymously.

And that’s a problem.

People who want to teach their daughters they have the right, the power, and yes sometimes the responsibility to say ‘no’ are being silenced. By feminists.