If I was writing a story about delicious recipes for pie, it would literally never dawn on me, even once, to go and get the opinions of people who have never eaten a slice of pie. That isn’t a demographic whose concerns I would ever bother to note. And yet look at the image above (from this), showing that it has been men - overwhelmingly men - asked to comment on the ongoing contraception meltdown on our national media shows, as if women are somehow secondary in this conversation, as if their needs don’t even register. In a nation where enormously large majorities of women ingest contraception, they can barely get a seat at the table to discuss the stuff while getting crowded out by men who have never even tasted the stuff get a spot.
In case that isn’t galling enough, consider the presence of the Catholic Bishops, a collection of men, overwhelmingly elderly, who are all virgins. Not only have they never taken contraception, they’ve never had to consider the possibility of wanting it in the first place. They’re being treated like experts in all of this, as if the individual who has never driven an automobile is as important to the conversation about how to fix one as a god-damned mechanic.
The people who run these television news programs are stupid. There simply isn’t a nicer way to make that point; they’re fucking dumb. They have to be if they think that women don’t at least deserve an equal number of appearances on these shows, although any reasonable person would probably agree that if there’s going to be any sort of imbalance, it probably ought to be toward the gender that actually takes the stuff we’re all arguing about.
But no. We’re taking as seriously the opinion of a bunch of elderly virgins as we are the opinions of sexually active, potentially pregnant women. We’re acting as though we’ve achieved some sort of impartiality by treating both sides equally. Lest anybody forget though, those same Catholic Bishops who are claiming to occupy the moral high ground now? They’re assholes like this, men who cheerleaded the sexual abuse of children for decades, men who have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their guilt in what amounted to an enormous criminal conspiracy designed solely to protect the church from responsibility for what it had done.
Our media is broken. There is simply no other worthwhile conclusion to be drawn from any of this. Making matters worse are the bigger and deeper societal problems that become painfully obvious whenever realize that we’re taking seriously the opinions of people who will never take contraception as we do of the the people that will.
