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OK, There's A War On Men

I recently observed that the right had invented a Democratic "war on men" to fend off complaints about the Republican war on women with regard to abortion and contraception. There is no war on men, I assured my readers. Perhaps I was too hasty. Although there's no serious war on men, apparently there has developed a parody war on men. State legislators are introducing various pieces of "anti-male" legislation related to reproduction not because they want them to become law but because they want to want to show how asinine and one-sided the conservative reproductive agenda is. So Constance Johnson, a state legislator in Oklahoma, for instance, introduced an amendment to a Republican "personhood bill" that would make it illegal for men to spill their seed anywhere but inside a woman on the grounds that it constitutes "an action against an unborn child." (But what about inside a sterile or post-menopausal woman? Gotta tighten up that language!) A secondary advantage to outlawing male masturbation would be that it would end much political debate on this and many other topics of no particular concern to state governance.

Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray has the details on this and six other excellent variations here.