"I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful."

Said the actress Jamie Chung — she's in "Dexter: New Blood" — quoted in "An actor’s use of a surrogate raises radical-feminist questions," a WaPo opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg. 

Chung, 39, acknowledged that people might assume she was “vain”... [S]urrogacy essentially offloads the discomforts and incapacities of pregnancy onto another woman. Yet there’s something galvanizing about hearing a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population... 

"But while I identify as a female, through the show I’ve learned that we probably need to stop focusing on the two sexes and expand it to equality of all human beings."

"Absolutely I’m a feminist. I support women. I want us to all succeed. But we need to expand that concept to humans in general because there are a lot of communities that are not being given an equal chance. So yes, feminism, but let’s broaden that conversation past just women.... Gender is so fluid, and everyone needs to get on board with that evolution. I don’t have all the answers. I am trying to learn.... When I got my braces off, got on Accutane, slapped some hair dye on and I started playing soccer and growing muscle... all of a sudden people started treating me differently because I was a hot chick. I felt like, Wow, that’s all it took? I still feel like the little ugly awkward girl in middle school. For a while I had to fake confidence and convince myself I was confident when I wasn’t. Knowing I’ve gone through that in my life, I can teach other women to fake it till you make it...."

From "Alex Cooper Is Coming for Joe Rogan’s Spot" (NYT).

This long piece that went up 3 days ago only has 1 comment. Isn't that strange? The article is all about how contagiously popular she is. 

The one commenter is concerned with the same thing I quoted:

"So yes, feminism, but let’s broaden that conversation past just women." When Alex Cooper talks about being a woman and a feminist, she feels a need to qualify it and basically say that feminism shouldn't just be about women. It seems incongruous that Ms. Cooper speaks this way about feminism when women's rights are currently being threatened in a very frightening way by the supreme court and state legislatures.....

Right. This is the problem I've been discussing under my tag "women (the word!)" and in posts like "If you won't say 'women,' you are embracing the self-subordination of weak political speech."

"Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, and destroys."

Wrote Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words : Addressed to Those who Think," in 1820:

That's quoted at the OED definition for "etiolate,"  which means "To lessen or undermine the strength, vigour, or effectiveness of (a quality, group, movement, etc.); to have a weakening effect upon." 

That's the second meaning. The oldest meaning is about plants: "To cause (a plant) to develop with reduced levels of chlorophyll (esp. by restricting light), causing bleaching of the green tissues, elongated internodes, weakened stems, deficiencies in vascular structure, and abnormally small leaves."

You take the plant out of the sun to etiolate it, but the woman needs to be kept out of the sun, lest she etiolate. So said Colton, anyway. He was one of the "boys" referenced in the more recent aphorism: "Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun...." The sun, Colton. 

But C.C. Colton is long gone. He died in 1832 — forever excluded from the sun — died of suicide, committed because, we're told, he had an illness that required surgery, and he dreaded surgery.

I'm reading about the word "etiolated" because I used it yesterday: "I'm collecting examples of this avoidance of the word 'woman' and the resultant etiolation of speech."

If you won't say "women," you are embracing the self-subordination of weak political speech.

I'm collecting examples of this avoidance of the word "woman" and the resultant etiolation of speech.

In "Abortion bans and penalties would vary widely by state," Politico quotes Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel to something called If/When/How:

"Even if a bill doesn’t allow pregnant people to be charged directly, we’re concerned about the ways increased surveillance could lead to people being criminalized for an abortion or another kind of pregnancy loss....These bills create an environment where a person’s private health information, their affect and demeanor and whether they are sufficiently distraught, could all become evidence in a case against someone else. They could still be treated as a suspect."

Here's the webpage for If/When/How, subtitled "Lawyering for Reproductive Justice." It describes its purpose without saying "women":

"Can the women’s movement be as effective without the word ‘women’?"

Asks Megan McArdle (at WaPo). 

Ironically and amazingly, McArdle goes about trying to answer this question without using the word "transgender" — or even "gender"! It is out of deference to transgender men (and transgender women) that we're seeing this avoidance of the word "woman." But McArdle is doing her own form of avoidance in this critique of avoidance.

Let's see how she does it:

Historically, the “women’s movement” was mobilized around what sociologists call a “thick” identity. Womanhood influenced almost every aspect of your life, from the biology of menstruation and childbirth, to how you dressed and acted, to your social roles....

But if you're a transgender woman, you don't have the menstruation and childbirth component, and if you're a transgender man, you don't dress and act and perform social roles in a manner that expresses womanhood. So in the transgender-focused view of the world, the "thickness" becomes series of thinner layers.

Has the Court's Dobbs draft shifted the press and other partisans back to saying "women," or is "pregnant people" still something they feel disciplined to say?

The Star Tribune has a column (by lawprof Laura Hermer) titled "Pregnant people have rights. Products of conception don't. The leaked Dobbs draft opinion gets fetal rights backward." The text uses the phrase "pregnant person" 5 times and there's also one "person who gave birth" and 5 appearances. 

The word "women" does show up once at the very beginning and once at the very end — in the phrase "women's rights." If you want strong political speech on this issue, you need to say "women's rights." You invite ridicule — even if we stifle our urge to ridicule outside of the confines of our head — if you decorously substitute "pregnant people's rights."

At USA Today, there's "People of color, the poor and other marginalized people to bear the brunt if Roe v. Wade is overturned" by Nada Hassanein. Wouldn't it be stronger to write "Women of color, the poor and other marginalized women"? 

We're told: "If Roe is overturned, people may travel hundreds of miles to get to states where abortions are still allowed. Young and low-income people, who are disproportionately of color, may not be able to afford the cost of travel." Wouldn't "women" generate more empathy? But "people" is used to remember to be empathetic to trans people. 

Anyway, the word "woman" is also used repeatedly in that article, including to refer to the as-yet-not-renamed National Women’s Law Center. 

The Washington Post has "Roe to be decided in one of the worst cities to be Black and pregnant/The stakes are not evenly spread across people who become pregnant, and if the Supreme Court justices need a reminder of that, they don’t have to look far" (by Theresa Vargas). The article does use the word "women" many times, along with many appearances of "people." We're told the Court's "mulling over what protections pregnant people deserve" is occurring in a geographic location where "almost all the pregnant people dying are Black." There's a quote from a report that says "Black birthing people constitute roughly half of all births in DC." (As if the "birthing people" are the "births"!) 

There are a lot of pieces about the Dobbs draft in The Washington Post, but only one other uses "pregnant people": "Meet the Reddit ‘Aunties’ covertly helping people get abortions/The Reddit group offers a glimpse into a post-Roe era where people resort to informal networks to assist those locked out of an abortion" (by Pranshu Verma). This one is very intent on saying "people" and not "women." "People" appears 18 times and the only appearance of the word "women" (there's no "woman") is in a caption under a photo of a clinic that has the word "Women's" in its name. 

Meanwhile, in the NYT, the phrase "pregnant people" has only appeared once since the draft leaked (and there's no example of "pregnant person"). It's in a new column by Emily Bazelon, "Beware the Feminism of Justice Alito." 

So that's a little evidence that the "pregnant people" nicety is getting nixed.

I can't check every elite publication for the absence of "pregnant people" — not if I want to write in this form called blog — but I did check one more, which I regard as an exemplar of liberal elitism, The New Yorker. It has not printed "pregnant people" since last November, in "If Roe v. Wade Goes, What Next?" (by David Remnick). 

I'll stop here, so I can post, but I'll be looking at this issue.