The Senate voted Saturday to deny taxpayer-funded abortions for federal employees, except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother's life. An earlier-passed House bill pays for abortion only when it would save the mother's life. The differences will be worked out in coming weeks.
Almost two and half centuries ago, England's circulating libraries--the Regency-era equivalent of Netflix--discovered a cash generator. Library subscribers could not get enough of The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho: the potent mix of danger and sex--often in the form of rape and incest--always brought readers back looking for more. Cultural critics fretted about the destructive effect of these novels on society as a whole, especially when--gasp!--a Member of Parliament (Matthew "Monk" Lewis) had penned such a nasty thing. Jane Austen satirized the genre in Northanger Abbey, yet she saved her real mockery for the social panic and made it clear she was an aficionado of these trashy novels herself. The booksellers found ways to keep capitalizing: they bound the novels--always about girls being locked up by evil Catholic (or Jewish or Muslim) uncles and fathers during the Middle Ages (or the English Civil War) in the middle of the Alps (or Spain, or Ireland)--in special red binding and gave them their own shelf. The clerk had but to point to the red-bound books when turned-on readers needing their next hit of exoticism and eroticism inquired. That shelf of "mysteries" has always fascinated me, for from that shelf's potent loins sprang first the romance novel, historical novel, and horror novel. Those commercial products, in turn, gave rise to the science fiction novel. And thus, in the 1970s, we watched Carrie Fisher locked up by her father in a huge castle--er, space station--and eventually rescued from her sado-masochistic torture by a naive farm boy and a knowing Byronic hero. In a nod to the changing times, the Space Princess with the secret past got to mock her rescuers a bit and even occasionally shoot a laser blaster: glorious feminist progress.
Incest Russian Mom Son
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