Life

Oklahoma Legislator Accuses Women Of Thinking Our Bodies Are Our Bodies

Host or Hostess? Image by Getty Images

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy February 15, 2017

Oklahoma legislator Justin Humphrey is making the news rounds after telling the Intercept that pregnant women aren’t people but rather “hosts.” How progressive of Humphrey not to use ‘hostess’, or maybe this was about referring to women as non-human objects, which, in the English language, aren’t gendered? The question up for discussion in the Oklahoma legislature — whether a male partner can veto an abortion — lends support to that possibility.

Anyway, the part of his doozy of a quote that jumped out at me wasn’t the “host” bit, or not mainly. It was this: “‘I understand that they feel like that is their body,’ he said of women.”

Let’s just unpack that for a moment: Women feel that our bodies are… our bodies. And women are, in Humphrey’s estimation, mistaken in that assumption? It sort of seems as if, in an attempt at making an anti-abortion case, he landed on a rather foundational pro-choice argument.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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