What We Talk About When We Talk About Elizabeth Bruenig | by Jude Ell…
The once-beloved “leftist” is facing backlash for her anti-abortion views. Why did it take this long?
She’s definitely not up to anything, right? Photo by
Toa Heftiba on
Unsplash
The first time I realized something was off about Elizabeth Bruenig, I was looking at her uterus. She had followed me on Twitter after I’d criticized someone named Matt Bruenig for harassing female journalists; she didn’t tell me they were married, and she was so friendly that I didn’t suspect. Her friendliness had a disconcerting edge to it. Every time I got too loud about gender (which was often) she’d pop in with one or two
tiny questions, just a
teensy correction, just a
leeeeeeeetle suggestion that maybe I was taking this whole sexism thing a little bit too seriously and possibly I should just relax? Maybe? A bit???
I told her I thought everyone had a responsibility to fight sexism. She told me she was “just a kid” who never even
wrote about gender (this will be important later) and anyway, what did I expect
her to do?
Things came to a head when Newsweek published a cover story about “America’s abortion wars.” The cover showed an image of a fetus in the second or third trimester; like most such imagery, it displaced any image of the pregnant person (whose right to an abortion was, presumably, the cause of the “war”) and was also bigger and older than
90% of aborted fetuses. When I said this, Elizabeth Bruenig tweeted back that she found the image realistic, actually! To this, she attached a picture of her own ultrasound. I had not previously known she was pregnant.
Dropping fetal images to derail a conversation about abortion rights was a tactic I recognized. It went all the way back to the
billboard truck that used to circle through my hometown with gooey “abortion” pictures printed under the word “CHOICE.” Even if the resemblance was somehow accidental, to find myself unexpectedly looking at the inside of her body (was I supposed to tell her the fetus was… cute? Large? Obviously more important than the right of full-grown adults to make their own medical decisions?) felt way creepier and more inappropriate than our previous interactions.
Soon afterward, someone emailed me the link:
“Why I am a Pro-Life Liberal,” by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig. As it turned out, Bruenig did write about gender — she just hadn’t wanted me to know what she said. This was not her first lie, nor her last, but before I continue, it’s important for you to know this: She fooled me, too.
Bad Elizabeth Bruenig takes are no longer surprising. They circulate frequently on social media. Most of them, like that 2014 article on “pro-life liberalism,” are bad in a specific, socially conservative, Catholic way: There’s the one where she argues that
gay people might still be acceptable in the eyes of God if they stayed celibate. There’s the one where she argues that
crisis pregnancy centers — fake abortion clinics that promise “help” with unwanted pregnancy, then terrorize patients into promising they won’t get an abortion — could end poverty. There’s the one where she argues against feminist affirmative consent standards (bad) then goes on to argue that
every decent relationship contains a little marital rape(much, much worse):
[Feminist writers] can tell us how such rules might produce more virtuous outcomes — licit sex, by their reasoning — but not how they might be compatible with the sex many of us are already having without complaint. Married and long-term couples often know a great deal about sleepy sex, duty-inspired sex, even fully consensual sex that is left a tad icy out of spite, all of which could be categorized as rape under the purview of affirmative consent.
Christ. Still, my favorite — a deep cut, since deleted — is the one where Bruenig depicts feminism as an elite academic conspiracy intent on cancelling women with “unorthodox” views such as, say, opposing the right to abortion:
[If] you ask me, I’m a woman writer on the left. If you ask other women writers on the left, I’m a rank misogynist because I’m pro-life… unorthodox views can, especially for women in left academic feminism, result in precisely that form of discipline: withdrawal of community, overwhelming assassination of character, a very sudden onslaught of negative feedback and demands for apology.
Taking issue with consent standards, with abortion, with queer sex, with consensual sex you view as licentious or promiscuous, is not “unorthodox” feminism; it’s just not feminism. To be outraged that feminists deplatform and criticize those views makes just as much sense as being angry that an NRA convention won’t let you give a speech about why we need to ban assault rifles.
This point is so basic that it feels condescending to spell it out — but one does, repeatedly, have to spell these things out with Bruenig, whose right-wing gender politics are supposedly mitigated by her being “on the left.” This is a vague claim to make, especially given that we are not supposed to factor her actual political positions into account when making it. Roughly, it seems to mean that Bruenig (1) supported Bernie Sanders, (2) knows a lot of podcasters, and (3) gestures in the direction of a stronger social safety net when making the case for forced birth.
Bruenig’s anti-abortion stance is the argument she has made most consistently throughout her career, from
The American Conservative to the New York
Times, changing only the language to be a little more cautious when necessary. That argument goes as follows: Abortion is a moral evil, “contrary to Christian ethics.” However, Bruenig does not have a heart of stone; she doesn’t want to jail abortion seekers.
Rather, she believes that they should be paid to have babies and stay home with them, or at least have the cost of childbirth covered by the state. With the financial obstacles of childbirth and early parenthood removed, there can be no remaining objection to carrying a pregnancy you didn’t intend or don’t want.
The problem here is not with free reproductive healthcare, wages for domestic labor, or state support of parents, all of which feminists have advocated for decades. It’s that those policies only have meaning in a world where you can also choose
not to be pregnant, in the same way that “everyone should wear a condom during sex” is only a commendable statement if you can also say “no” to the sex itself. An unwanted pregnancy is a profound bodily violation, and it can kill the pregnant person. To strip women and trans people of agency, violate their bodies, kill thousands of them, and then throw the survivors some free diapers isn’t “leftism;” it’s barbarism with a sheen of feel-good charity to make it sell.
Bruenig has gotten remarkably good at polishing this turd, though. She no longer rails agains
t feminists for persecuting “pro-life women” or argues that it is a married woman’s duty to accept a little violation. Rather, she operates in the form of little hints, tiny nudges, an endless series of just-one-questions.
She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but women are putting off childbirth for no good reason. She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but if you got pregnant before you wanted to, it would probably be for the best. She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but she’s being persecuted for not supporting abortion. She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but people who take issue with wanting to ban abortion sure are buzzkills! She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but there is no better experience than being a mommy to a precious baby and women who don’t want to do that are monsters, possibly? She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but birth rates are dropping. She’s not saying we should ban all abortion — but now that 26 states have banned abortion, here’s what “the mass movement” can do next.
The clearest parallel is to the anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal (with whom Bruenig maintains an unsurprising friendship). The vast majority of trans people can read a Singal piece and see an argument for rolling back trans rights, but his rhetoric is carefully hedged so that some well-meaning Boomer parent can believe he’s “just asking questions.” Reproductive rights advocates can read an Elizabeth Bruenig piece and see that she’s against them. People on the sidelines often have no idea why those advocates are upset.
Bruenig’s slipperiness allows her (like Singal) to make an argument significantly to the right of the one she claims to be making. Still, the argument is clear. Consider a sentence from that 2014 piece on “pro-life liberalism:” “Since we care enough about the outcome of pregnancy to insist against abortion, then we must continue to care about the outcome when abortion is no longer a legal option.”
Did you catch it? I didn’t, at first. It’s so subtle, just a whiff of a suggestion of a hint of a teeeeeensy tell: “When abortion is no longer a legal option.”
Not “if.” When.
For Elizabeth Bruenig, the overturn of Roe has always been both possible and desirable. Her “leftism” is simple cleanliness: She wants to be standing just far enough away that she won’t be spattered with blood when the axe falls.
Why write about Elizabeth Bruenig now, when there is so much suffering to attend to? Her most prominent gig, as an opinion columnist for the New York
Times, is behind her. Audiences seem to have turned on her. She belongs to the same dim pantheon as
Katie Roiphe and
Caitlin Flanagan — quick-burn contrarians who lobbed a few cherry bombs at Feminism’s vast iron-plated hull, rode out the hype cycle, and disappeared into the night (or at least The Atlantic, where people
expect this sort of thing).
Yet it matters to understand how this happened; for several years, one of the most prominent media representatives of “socialism” held right-wing views, and for much of that time, people who objected were more likely to be mocked or screamed at than they were to be heard.
To understand Bruenig, you have to place her in the context of the (ugh, fine) “dirtbag left,” the ascendant socialist class of ’16, which used the Sanders campaign to argue that “leftism” needed to purge itself of identity politics, or even tolerate a certain amount of bigotry, in order to draw the white working class. To make a big deal out of slurs or rape jokes was “civility,” it was milquetoast liberalism, it was elitist, it alienated the humble white working men we needed to boost our numbers and make real gains. And so on.
