A Sharp Right Turn

~ Clarissa

That a mega lefty Asian-American writer Emiko Jean would write the most pro-life novel I have ever read (or imagined reading) is a surprising and encouraging sign of a cultural turn that is underway. In Mika in Real Life, a teenager’s decision to give birth to a child of rape is never explained, let alone justified. To the contrary, it’s presented as such a normal thing to do that no explanation is necessary. The entire novel exists around the idea that this was the only good thing the main character did in her life. All of the pro-life folks should shut up right now because they usually make their case in the clumsiest possible way. Instead, they need to buy mountains of copies of Mika and hand them out to late teens and young adults. I’m a lifelong abortion rights supporter, and I honestly say that the book’s message landed with me. It didn’t transform me into a different person but if I’d read it as a teenager, it probably would have.

Jean is very mainstream, best-selling, and, once again, so left-wing that AOC looks conservative by her side. But she’s not writing about lefty topics anymore because there’s no longer that much interest.

Then there’s the exceptionally lefty Jewish-American Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. This year she also effectuated a sharp right turn away from her formerly deeply woke interests.

Writers are barometers of reality. If they have even a crumb of talent, their text will wrestle control and run its own way. I have no idea what Jean and Brodesser-Ackner wanted to say in their novels. It’s utterly unimportant because we can never find out for certain. But they are showing that the weather has changed and we are moving in a different direction now.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Clarissa

46 thoughts on “A Sharp Right Turn”

    1. Are you sure they’re interested? They’re fully onboard with the left wedge strategy of, find an edge case that people will feel either sympathetic about, or at least can be made to look bad for opposing, and then use it as a wedge to crack the rules open and let a bunch of other stuff through that no sane, normal person would support.

      I’m sympathetic to normal people just living their lives who get suckered in by that stuff, but people employing the strategy themselves are not in the naive sucker crowd. They’re part of the problem.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I don’t know, I generally give people the benefit of the doubt and I hope they will do the same with me, if they’re honest.

        Sometimes people just do not have enough information; but I agree with you, very often the most militant exponents of the neo-liberal ideology are simply impervious to anything but their own ideas.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. Eh, I think the split between enemy combatants and civilians lies there: do they simply believe the propaganda and repeat it like a good little parrot but otherwise try to engage as people of good will, in good faith? Or do they use the strategy listed in the handbook: bring up an edge case, and when anyone attempts to argue against it, don’t engage the argument (that’s a weak flank), deflect by changing the subject, nitpicking on some tangential issue, and character assassination. If you look back through the last twenty-plus years of progressive causes, you can see the same strategy in action the whole way.

          They do it because it’s effective, and saps the emotional energy out of their opponents. There are a couple of effective counter-strategies: Set to ignore, or if you must get into the fray, keep forcing them back to the main point, don’t get suckered into the asides. Answer the main question. Oh, you didn’t answer the question. Here it is again. And again. And again. Just like in congressional hearings with weasels from three-letter agencies, eventually the evasions become ridiculous and self-incriminating.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

            1. Re the Witch Test

              This is brilliant. I wish I had known about it sooner. In one of his replies, Col. Potter [is that supposed to be some humorous reference to Pol Pot? Not funny at all.] tried using this Holier than Thou approach with me when he surmised that I might be a person of faith: Something closed in your mind and heart instead. It’s too bad that if there is an “end of all things,” the only response you’ll receive from the Big Guy is “Sorry, man, I never knew you.”

              Calling God “the Big Guy” when speaking to a person of faith is really in poor taste. Still, God’s grace is infinitely greater than my ability to comprehend it, so it’s all right in the end.

              Funny thing is, since becoming a Christian, I have not encountered anyone in my parish saying something like that. It’s always the non-believing bullsh**ters.

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

              3. Regarding my moral authority: I just talked to God. He told me you’re wrong.

                And sure, Jesus is risen. He told me you’re wrong, too.

                Like

              4. Reply system got me again. Could be a divine warning.

                Col. Potter (named for a character in M*A*S*H, not Pol Pot, you cheeky devil).

                Liked by 1 person

              5. We have many people from other countries here on this blog who don’t know what MAS*H is. I’ve never seen a single episode myself. I vaguely know it’s a TV show about the 1950s or 1960s but that’s it.

                I’m sure nobody meant any disrespect.

                Like

              6. I appreciate your contribution, Clarissa, but I’m afraid avi’s and my history paints a pretty clear picture–he meant a great deal of disrespect, rudeness, invective, and vitriol. And if I’m being honest, I’ve given a fair amount of those things back. Maybe it’s because we’re dealing with those heavy questions of good v. evil; perhaps it’s to do with picking at the most personal relationships we have–those with our concept of a Creator.

                I see the arc of the blog seems to rejoice in a turn to the right as a brighter hope for things to come. Well, I’ll admit–if that’s really true, then I hope I’ve been wrong about what turns to the right entail. I’m sure I’ll be spouting about choices, reproductive rights, and Olympic boxing soon enough, but it might be wiser for me to embrace silent thoughtfulness for a while.

                Like

              7. Here’s a question to ponder. Why does the phrase “reproductive rights” always and only concentrate on the right to not reproduce? A staggering number of women in developed countries report that they didn’t have as many children as they wanted. This is a contrast to the piddling number of women who report not having enough abortions.

                Why is reproductive freedom never about creating the sort of a society where women can have as many children as they want? This is one of the big things on the right at the moment. I’m a lifelong feminist, and this was always my issue. Men and women are physiologically different, yet only male physiology is serviced by our way of life. The Left abandoned all interest in this, so I went to the Right. The Left’s idea of “reproductive freedom” is freedom for men to outsource their surplus sexuality to women who pay the consequences. But I can’t make this argument on the Left because I can’t even say “men and women”.

                Liked by 1 person

              8. That is a very good question. I guess as long as I can remember, the narrative with which I was most familiar was, “abortion rights are in danger, and thus, women are in danger.” I also used to hear, “don’t call us pro-abortion, we’re pro-choice.” So realistically, yes, choice would include having more children, and all choices should be available. More pondering on that later.

                I’m not sure what we do about male’s surplus sexuality (is this regarding trans issues)? And I know the vocabulary and the jargon can be… annoying? Perplexing (and yes, easy to make fun of)? But I think we’re still talking about men and women for the most part.

                Like

              9. Servicing male surplus sexuality comes in the form of hookup culture, OnlyFans, female hormonal contraception, abortion, etc. Why is it never male tubal ligation instead of abortion? Why do women always have to bear the brunt ?

                As for choice. My mother’s friend had 24 abortions. This was before pill abortion. Every single one was surgical, involving the scraping of the uterine wall. None was the woman’s choice in any meaningful way. This is why I never found the rhetoric of choice useful or interesting. Choices don’t happen in a vacuum. This choice to give birth vs abort is made within societal rhetoric that either positions childbirth as limiting and onerous or doesn’t. This is why I’m pleasantly surprised by Emiko Jean’s novel. It signals a turn towards a woman-friendly narrative of child-bearing. I’ve been waiting for that my whole life and finally I’m seeing it.

                Liked by 1 person

              10. I appreciate the clarification, and the example. I do think vasectomies and male tube fixing should be a bigger part of the conversation. Obviously a lot of us follow through on societal assumptions regarding how much women should do and how much men should do…? (Women need to bear the brunt because, well, men…)

                I’m glad the book spoke to you in a positive way–very nice when that happens.

                Like

    2. To continue on the topic of boxing and educating oneself, when someone said something along the lines of “will a woman need to be killed by a biological male in the boxing ring for this to be stopped?”, I became curious about deaths during/after boxing matches. I thought that men must be killing each other that way all the time. And, it turns out, they are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_due_to_injuries_sustained_in_boxing

      As I read through that list, I noticed that the first female death happened almost 20 years ago. Here’s a link to an article on it: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2005/apr/06/real-life-tragedy-in-ring/

      I’ve tried to find more information on the opponent or pictures of her. I haven’t succeeded but I also haven’t found any information on any suspicions of her being biologically male.

      The second female death was recent, in 2021: https://www.bbc.com/sport/boxing/58432013

      You can find plenty of pictures of the opponent online.

      Like

      Reply

  2. “All of the pro-life folks should shut up right now because they usually make their case in the clumsiest possible way. Instead, they need to buy mountains of copies of Mika and hand them out to late teens and young adults.” As a pro-lifer, I had this exact thought reading the review. Though I question whether it would be counterproductive to even loosely connect the book to the movement, our horrifically bad branding could sink it.

    It’s tragic to me how terrible we are at this. Conservative writers are often uncomfortable with any kind of ambiguity and feel the need to didactically beat you over the head with their message. Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway should undoubtedly be embraced by pro-lifers, but Hemingway doesn’t explicitly write out “abortion is bad!” or produce any of the hackneyed, cliched images we’re so fond of.

    P.S. I’ve been commenting here, I just didn’t get logged in on my new phone until now.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. More literature the pro-life movement should embrace: A Modest Proposal. I think of this one whenever a “compassionate” left winger argues that abortion is a solution to poverty, and that it’s cruel and heartless to deny it to the poor.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Any brilliant, insightful comment by an anonymous person, that was me. Any stupid, bad, boring comment? Definitely someone else 😛

        Like

        Reply

    3. I’ve actually considered trying to compile a literary (covertly) pro-life reading list. But 1, I wouldn’t know what to put on it beyond what I’ve discussed here, and 2, thinking of literature solely in terms of politics is the problem the right has in the first place. This is why the left dominates literature and the arts. The publishing industry is very biased but you could remove that bias tomorrow and not much would change; it’s easy to point fingers but it’s harder to look inward.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I’ll keep looking. If there is, indeed, a cultural turn, there will be more manifestations of it. For now, I’m very heartened by what I’m seeing.

        Like

        Reply

  3. Poor girl was not even out of her teens before being raped, going through a pregnancy as a result and then having to give her baby away. I imagine this series of traumas may have contributed to her later struggles.

    JD Vance agrees with you that rape and incest are no excuse for baby-killing. I have to respect this position. If one really believes that abortion is murder why would it ever be okay? Fortunately, this is the position of a small minority, maybe 15% of Americans at most.

    So this blog is pretty extreme, and the sanctimony and shaming and virtue signalling is really over the top around here lately. Feels like an echo chamber of cold-hearted people. Time for another long break, maybe a permanent one.

    So long,

    Sybil

    Like

    Reply

    1. Normies trying to exert social pressure to conform to majority: “OMG y’all are such FREAKS, literally NOBODY thinks like that…”

      You missed the opportunity when you booted us out back in grade school. Broke off the handle on the social steering mechanism, and now you don’t get to drive. Wheee! 😀

      If you wanna control people in that way, they have to want your approval.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. It’s pure projection. These are people for whom being accepted by the group is absolutely everything. If the group doesn’t “validate their truth”, it’s like they don’t exist. That’s why they constantly insist on their “pronouns” and being mentioned “inclusively” in every story.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. That is so sad, though. I understand in theory why the social/herd impulse is necessary for groups of people to function over time, but I can’t imagine how dismal and anxiety-inducing it’d be, to have my whole sense of self depend on the opinions of people around me.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

  4. @Sybil

    “sanctimony and shaming and virtue signalling is really over the top around here lately“

    I’m afraid you’re seeing with your mind’s eye and not through the lens of objective reality. Please cite evidence for your accusations from the answers of commenters on this blog.

    I’m an opponent of abortion but I would never consider a woman who has had an abortion a murderer or a criminal, more like a victim of circumstances who deserves my compassion.

    Abortion is a complex and difficult issue and it doesn’t help when people banalise it either way. However, I will say this. First, the most strident and implacable supporters of abortion never use the word and keep hammering on “reproductive health rights”: if they are so in favpur of abortion why do they seem so shy to use the word? Second, the vast majority of the same people have not had an abortion and will never in their lives find themselves in circumstances where they will need one: ask yourself why.

    I used to be a Radical Party activist in my country, the party of abortion, for over 30 years. No pro-lifer ever changed my mind. It was only when I started to document myself on the harrowing medical procedures, listening to the testimony of former abortionist doctors and nurses detailing their experiences, that something turned in me. The change was slow and painful and it led me to question almost everything in my life and lifestyle choices.

    There are 600 Planned Parenthood “clinics” in the US, compared to over 3000 pregnancy help centres. Again, ask yourself why.

    I do not presume anything about what your personal reasons may be for supporting a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy at her discretion: I think you should extend the same courtesy to me and people like me and you might find that we are not “cold-hearted” brutes, but simply people whose opinions you do not share.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  5. \ a teenager’s decision to give birth to a child of rape is never explained, let alone justified. To the contrary, it’s presented as such a normal thing to do that no explanation is necessary. 

    Several years ago, we discussed the conservative stance of lauding the behavior of not having abortion even after rape.

    Then you were not enthusiastic about this approach which, among other things, rewards the rapist by spreading his genes. Also, one shudders to think what raped women will psychologically go through during such pregnancy, and how it’ll affect both a woman and a fetus.

    //  It didn’t transform me into a different person but if I’d read it as a teenager, it probably would have.

    Do you think you would’ve been against abortion rights then?

    I think you simply changed with age, so perceive this novel differently. As a teen, you may’ve cast it aside w/o finishing since it’s not a great work of literature.

    Besides, I do not believe any novel, even extremely well written one, will make an intelligent person change his behaviour in extreme situation like Mika’s. As a teen, I read Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” w/o agreeing with his views on women.

    A writer may portray anything in one’s works, but it doesn’t make those scenarios any more realistic than Cinderella-like stories of poor single mothers marrying young, hot and kind millionaires.

    In reality, women, who surrender children for adoption, suffer horrible consequences destroying their lives, which isn’t true for women who choose abortion. Here is a great link to very short summaries of numerous studies.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I would have been grateful and my whole life would have been different if somebody, somewhere let me know that for a woman, having a child was not a horrible imposition that ruins her life but a luminous pinnacle of her entire existence.

      Emiko Jean’s novel doesn’t argue about abortion. In fact, abortion isn’t mentioned at all. Instead, the novel offers an understanding of motherhood that is healthy, profound and needs to be supported.

      I don’t want to tell anybody to abort or not abort. But I want to see a complete transformation in how we see and understand the female body, the female sexuality, and the female reproductive journey. The women who will get pregnant as a result of rape are the tiniest minority. Instead of fixating on them, we should concentrate on our own problems. The whole approach to female physicality that has won the mainstream is backwards and wrong. It’s time to change it.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. Having grown up in the U.S., the pinnacle language was a constant drumbeat in the background.Having grown up with a mother did not want me, all hearing the pinnacle language did for me was make me decide anti-abortion Christians were cruel liars who did not care about what they sentenced children to.

        Like

        Reply

      2. Yes! Everything I knew about just the biological side of it when I was growing up made me absolutely terrified of having kids. I think probably there are a lot of books out there that, for *someone* were that kind of revelation, that cast things in such a different, and unexpected (wholesome even) light, that we were able to make a complete turn, mentally, about it. The culture, and sometimes our parents, can be very negative about all of it. For me that book was Ina May Gaskin’s *Spiritual Midwifery* which even at the time was rather dated and very hippie, but still– it was just what I needed to read at the time– something radically different from all the information I’d been raised with.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

        1. My mother, her sisters and friends would get together and share the most terrifying, detailed stories of childbirth with an inevitable conclusion that life became so much worse afterwards.

          We lack stories about the true nature of parenthood, about how it makes even the most mundane tasks transcendent and how exceptionally enjoyable it is.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

          1. IKR? Lotta women seem to make a hobby out of scaring the living daylights out of girls and women who haven’t had kids yet. I think that is not even the majority experience, but it cows everybody else into silence, because… there’s nothing that exciting about “oh, yeah, childbirth was quick and easy and no big deal, and my kids are awesome.”… and if you *do* say that in the same conversation as someone telling their childbirth horror story, it’s seen as somehow denigrating the trauma-story so you’d better just shut up. No win, there. And it’s not like you shouldn’t be able to talk about a bad experience, that’s important too. It’s just that it shouldn’t be *more* important than talking about the completely normal and good experiences, and shouldn’t shove those discussions off the table, like the bad experience trumps all other experience.

            It’s like the whole neurosis around breastfeeding/formulafeeding. Like, of course it’s great that formula exists, and we no longer have to find a wet-nurse or the baby dies, if something goes wrong with the process. But that doesn’t mean we need to muzzle everybody and shame them for talking about the natural process. On the plus side, I am noticing some progress on that front in my own social circle– we’ve finally come through the cobwebs, and now it’s OK to say “here’s what we did and why” and “this is what worked for this or that kid” without being perceived as judgy by everybody who did something different. Kids are different, moms are different, families are different, and everybody’s got their own situation to work with: suddenly what we are developing is a deep well of helpful experience, which is really cool.

            Like

            Reply

      3. “I would have been grateful and my whole life would have been different if somebody, somewhere let me know that for a woman, having a child was not a horrible imposition that ruins her life but a luminous pinnacle of her entire existence.”

        That would have been a nice story to make you consider that possibility, I agree. But this sentence exemplifies your autism, as you used to call it, or intensity, or who knows what, and – to me- motivated reasoning.

        What you said above is a huge lie. How can you not see it? How can you not see probabilities and chance and factors outside of your control?

        There is a probability that for a human having a child will be “a luminous pinnacle of her/his entire existence”. The exact number depends on many factors starting with whether the parent is a mother or a father, the health of the parents and the child, what kind of personality the child turns out to have, economic circumstances, etc.

        The fact that you are a woman and having your specific child was that pinnacle for you doesn’t therefore imply that having a child is the pinnacle for any woman.

        Like

        Reply

        1. I’ll keep talking to myself, I guess.

          I’m saying your statement is not true because it wasn’t for my own mother. I’m an only child so I bear witness to all of the potential joy she could have derived from parenting. We talked about it when I became an adult.

          “We lack stories about the true nature of parenthood, about how it makes even the most mundane tasks transcendent and how exceptionally enjoyable it is.”

          It was, in fact, the other way around. My mother found all the mundane practical tasks of parenting so overwhelming there was no emotional bandwidth left for anything else. That was what came out of her mouth, the analysis of her own feelings and actions. And I agree that it’s a good description of the situation.

          You’re telling me and implicitly my mother not to believe our own eyes and ears and that what we lived through is false.

          Like

          Reply

    2. This is a great link, el, thanks. Adoption is not the great answer to rape and teen pregnancy that it’s touted to be. It introduces life-long trauma to baby and mother. I feel the same way about surrogacy, which is worse for creating a situation where an infant is ripped from the birth mother.

      Sybil

      Like

      Reply

  6. Servicing male surplus sexuality comes in the form of hookup culture, OnlyFans, female hormonal contraception, abortion, etc. Why is it never male tubal ligation instead of abortion? Why do women always have to bear the brunt ?

    As for choice. My mother’s friend had 24 abortions. 

    I see the issue as mainly stemming from insufficient advancement in feminism / women’s rights rather than surplus male sexuality.

    For instance, I heard a story of one Jewish woman from Caucasus who had numerous abortions from her husband. What was surplus there was not sex(uality) itself but rather patriarchal treatment of women like dirt. ( Even in Israel her daughter couldn’t date or serve in IDF, and married somebody from Caucasus too. Living among Muslims did leave a mark on this Jewish community. )

    Female hormonal contraception lets women too practice their sexuality, which usually happens with husbands and long-term boyfriends.

    As for abortion, with the rise in women’s social position and with the development of contraceptive methods, it is becoming increasingly rare even in Russia. I listened to a Russian demographer, who talked about a sharp decline in abortion in the past years, a few weeks ago.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Here’s precisely where we get shifted into a negative direction. We convince ourselves that women need to be liberated into being like men. Nobody ever suggests that men are oppressed by the patriarchy into seeking OnlyFans and we need to liberate it into the direction of them giving it up.

      How much more liberation do we need to notice that there’s no demand for male OnlyFans among women?

      This reminds me of that cheater website where almost all clients were male and the website owners had to create female bots to simulate female demand. And the hilarious part was that male customers honestly thought there were all these women eager to go on websites to find cheating partners. They believed it because they bought into the myth that women are exactly like men.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Wrote the last comment of 13:15 before reading your answer.

        We convince ourselves that women need to be liberated into being like men.

        Think there are several different issues here that we’re discussing at once.

        You’re talking about an American subculture which supports hookup culture and OnlyFans, seeing them as liberating for (some) women, right?

        Since this doesn’t seem to exist in Israel, I can only try to understand the scale of it from Internet. Still, the harm of that approach in the Western world seems to be small compared with other issues which I discussed.

        I offer to try to separate different elements when discussing reproductive rights, and see the number of children women have as being affected by numerous other things rather than inherently surplus male sexuality. Am afraid that concentrating on the latter will only muddy the waters.

        Like

        Reply

        1. I don’t think it’s Victorian to notice that after 60 years of active liberation, we have not succeeded in liberating women into needing OnlyFans or Ashley Madison. Instead, women do things that are very uncomfortable to them to prove that their sexuality is identical to men’s. One in 4 women in the US say they’ve had sex when they didn’t want to. This isn’t rape, as many want to assume, but situations like that of the Mattress Girl. She agreed to anal sex she didn’t remotely need in hopes it would turn into a relationship. When it didn’t, she took her revenge.

          We can see these differences in the gay community. Not all but enough gay men go into rapid, one-off sex encounters for it to be a cultural phenomenon. Not all but enough lesbians get together to have masses of babies for it to be a cultural phenomenon. This is very clearly observable, for example, when even the threat of monkey flu wasn’t enough for anybody to find the courage to tell gay men to abstain from multiple-partner orgies. Nobody has to tell lesbians to do that, and not only because of the nature of the fluid exchange during lesbian sex.

          Like

          Reply

  7. Why does the phrase “reproductive rights” always and only concentrate on the right to not reproduce? A staggering number of women in developed countries report that they didn’t have as many children as they wanted. 

    Now wondering whether anyone even thought to ask men whether they had as many children as they wanted or not. This truly could’ve been an interesting study. For all we know, this issue could be as relevant for men as it is for women.

    I often see posts on various blogs discussing neoliberal approach of governments, which even prefer to import immigrants w/o investing money to raise people from birth. Besides, immigrants have less rights and abilities to make demands, unlike the local population.

    Discussing “reproductive rights” as the right to reproduce immediately leads to discussing economic policies and work conditions, which many in America see as “socialist.” It also leads to discussing demographic transitions, caused by modernity, which even that Russian demographer didn’t know how to change.

    Also, young people are having significantly less sex than previous generations. Studies find that “during the past two decades, testosterone levels in American men have rapidly declined“. Finding this excessive male sexuality will soon become an Olympic Quest for a woman.  

    All of the above concerns men as much as women. If we concentrate on supposedly excessive male sexuality, aren’t we helping to hide the real issues of modernity behind Victorian rhetorics?

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment