Feminist deep thinker Amanda Marcotte is back…and as far as we can tell she may be the only person in the universe who sees the artistic merit of those ObamaCare ads featuring sex-crazed millennials. The ads are a joint effort of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and Progress Now.
IWF’s Krista Kafer, by the way, found the ads demeaning to women. Which seems to us a normal reaction. But not quite Marcotte’s.
A Denver newspaper described one of them:
"OMG, he's hot! Let's hope he's as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers," read the words in the risqué advertisement.
Thanks to our friend Charlotte Allen, whose spiffy new blog includes an “Amanda Marcotte IQ Watch,” we now know Amanda’s take on the ads. Amanda opines:
It’s a cute ad drawing attention to the fact that health insurance is required to cover contraception now. Of course, it’s also an ad that makes the apparently controversial observation that women might feel sexual desire like they’re people, so naturally, conservatives are up in arms.
Of course, Amanda is terrified that mean old Republicans are coming to snatch birth control pills away from Millennial damsels:
The whining from the right shows why the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and Progress Now were smart to run such a blunt ad highlighting the birth control benefit. Women do use birth control to have sex without getting pregnant, and if pro-choicers dance around that fact or employ euphemism to discuss it, it lends credence to the notion that there is something shameful about it. Being direct about sex provoked conservatives to once again reignite a no doubt doomed campaign to stigmatize contraception, making the right look like a radical fringe completely out of step with mainstream America.
I’ve been urging the GOP to come up with a response to the birth control canard (preferably a response that doesn't include the word canard). It may be that mockery is the best medicine.
Charlotte Allen does a brilliant job of ridculing Marcotte’s hysteria over the threatened birth control pills—so brilliant, in fact, that I am affraid I am going to have to perform just a smidgen of censorship.
But here's the gist of what Charlotte wrote–just to whet your appetite:
No, Amanda, we on the right aren’t trying to “stigmatize” contraception. We think you have a right to pack as many one-nighters into your life as Carter has little liver pills.
And please, pleeeeeze use birth control….We just don’t want you to force other people to pay for the stuff. …
BTW, are young women really dumb enough to think that a $900-a-month Obamacare insurance policy is a great idea because they get $20 a month worth of “free” birth-control pills? Amanda Marcotte thinks they’re that dumb.
Wish Mitt Romney had had Charlotte Allen in one of his binders full of women.
This is just the sort of response the Democrats deserve when they make stupid claims about Republicans and birth control pills.