Calling a Vagina a Vagina

Pamela Paul, an upper class New York socialite who is likely to be protected by all but the most wide spread form of misogyny, got quite a large amount of talk yesterday from her article in The New York Times “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” One Twitter user satirized the article by replacing the headline with “I Know The GOP Made It Legal To Rape a Child and Force Her To Give Birth, But A Trans Person Corrected Me On Their Pronouns Once and That Feels Just As Bad.”

For the record, despite this article saying both the left and the right are equally sexist, only one specific example of right-wing sexism is brought up — and it’s in the third paragraph of the article:

The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.

Mind you, as mentioned above, Paul is an incredibly wealthy New York socialite who was once married to a hedge fund manager. Even if abortion ever became illegal on a federal level, she could still access it through flying to another country. All the repeal of Roe v. Wade did was give states unlimited power to regulate abortion if they so choose. Considering Paul lives in the liberal hotbed of New York, which already had some of the most relaxed abortion laws before Roe v. Wade, she was under no threat through its loss.

For the record, this is not me saying that Paul is not interested in the continuation of abortion rights, but this is me saying that this article seems incredibly out of touch on premise. If Paul were to go to one of those icky flyover states and ask the women there if they’re more concerned about the loss of control over their own bodies or the existence of transgender women — I promise you anyone who’s pro-choice will say the first one. My home state of Ohio recently told a ten-year-old girl that she could not get an abortion after being raped — I imagine the family is not concerned about transgender people.

However, this leads to an important question: If this is what the right is doing, what is the left doing that’s even comparable…