<Fair warning: As part of my general plan to be personally happier I mostly excised news about politics from my life. However, the recent Akin abortion-rape trainwreck made it through my filters and pushed so many Handmaid’s Tale buttons that when I saw this video last night at 3 am I just couldn’t leave it alone. Nothing here will be a surprise to anyone who has taken Women’s Studies 101 – but it still felt good to get it off my chest.>

Control is a beast.

Or, rather, realizing that you don’t have it is a beast.

For most well-adjusted people that realization is the primary determinant of being a grown up. We realize that at best we can control our own lives some of the time, but we can’t control anyone else even a tiny fraction of the time. There are long treatises on how this all relates to sphincter tone and breast-feeding . . . but the bottom line is that most people understand that everyone else also has desires and needs and that if those desires and needs don’t coincide with our desires and needs . . . the person they belong to isn’t going to do what we want them to do.

It’s easy to forget that. We become so attached to the narratives in our heads that we project them onto others and assume that they are just extensions of ourselves who obviously are going to desire and need the same things that we do. But, sooner or later, we come up against the shocking reality that we’re not the boss of anyone else.

That’s when things can get awkward.

This popped up when I searched for “smug Ryan pic.” Sanctimonious might yield the same result. http://redgreenandblue.org/2012/08/14/paul-ryans-fortune-comes-from-the-infrastructure-spending-that-paul-ryan-wants-to-slash/

If that realization is made by a well socialized grown-up, then he or she will realize that one of the great (if challenging) joys of the human experience is negotiating a shared existence with other people and that a world in which everyone was just an extension of you would be pretty boring (as awesome as you may be). There may be sadness, and some degree of arm-twisting – but at the end of the day we’re happy to let others be themselves even if their choices hurt us and even if they aren’t the choices we think we’d make in the same circumstances.

Not everyone is a well socialized grown-up.

There are people who can’t handle the idea that they don’t get to decide the fates of others. Most of the time we call those people criminals. They take what they want, be it material, psychological, or corporeal and they do so because they see their desires as more legitimate than the desires of those they’re taking from.

Sadly, that also describes many people in positions of political power. It describes the people who are happy to further a system in which a great many work very hard to enrich a few. It describes the people who feel justified in ending lives (the ultimate theft of control) to facilitate “regime change” be it for mercantile or socio-religious purposes. And it describes the people who want to be able to decide what women get to do with their reproductive organs.

A transvaginal ultrasound is a fantastic diagnostic tool – last night I used one to diagnose a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and maybe saved a young woman’s life. But when it is used against a woman’s consent to coerce her into not having an abortion . . . it’s just another kind of rape, a means by which someone is government steals control over someone else’s body.

I really don’t know anything about what goes on in the heads of people like Paul Ryan. Maybe he hates women. Maybe he is afraid of women. Maybe he really is kept awake at night by paroxysms of moral outrage at the thought of all the women out there who want to make up their own minds about what they allow to grow in their uteruses. That latter option would seem strange since he apparently sleeps fine at night after deciding who needs to have their government benefits cut in order to fund mansion upgrades. But since I think most of the modern Republican party is a giant machine for furthering oligarchic rule by multi-national corporations and a handful of the ultra-wealthy through slight of hand played to the unresolved control issues of 49-51% of the population, it’s reasonable to assume that its leadership is susceptible to the same tricks they play on the rank and file.

Regardless of what his personal beliefs and motivations are, the policies that he and his compatrioats endorse are about control. Their control – over the people they are supposed to be representing.

When a lone person robs another of control over her own body we call it rape. Maybe it is about lust. Maybe it is about misogyny. But it is always about control.

What the recent developments should tell anyone who is paying attention is that while when that same thing happens at a governmental level it is called “policy,” that’s just a sanitized word for exactly the same thing. The abominable Texas ultrasound law in which a pregnant woman seeking an abortion would potentially have to submit to the insertion of a probe into her vagina makes the connection explicit; but the language Ryan uses - rape described as a “method of conception” – is only a more subtle way of saying the same thing. The woman – the victim of a violent assault in which the control of her body was stolen from her – is reduced to a biological machine for the support of a uterus which itself is the property not of that woman, but of a creepy politician who is happy to use laws to steal control from that woman again.

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