A New Old Problem with No Name

I read Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia when it was published 15 years ago, in 1994.  I reread some of it on Saturday night.  It was part of my futile never-ending quest to understand why and how some men exploit women and children and generally get to go on with their lives without consequences, as though it never happened.  The book includes the case of a teenage girl whom 4 boys  pulled into a car  while she was walking home alone.  3 of the 4 took turns raping her while laughing and joking, as well as declaring that she had “asked for it” by walking alone.

As it turns out, exactly as I was reading this, a 15-year-old girl in Richmond was being raped and beaten by as many as 10 of her her high school acquaintances, while 20 or more watched and laughed and even recorded the torture.  None were brave enough to intervene or even to sneak off and call police, though some grew bold enough to join in the raping.

From the comments on many of the articles on this particular attack, I find that many are blaming race and class, when they are not blaming the victim herself.  Yet the victim described in Reviving Ophelia was white and middle-class, and presumably her attackers were also.  And the attackers in the Polanski and Phillips cases were most solidly privileged, white entertainers.  (Both Roman Polanski and John Phillips are accused of drugging and raping their teenage victims, in Phillips’ case his own daughter.)  Polanski acted alone, but the media and his Hollywood supporters have generally filled in for the role of leering mob.

Many also blame porn, but I think it is at worst a symptom, not a disease.  Reviving Ophelia was published well before the internet was streaming pornography into everyone’s bedrooms.   Polanski’s case, as his defenders never tire of pointing out, is decades old.

The only truly common denominators are these:  that these children were raped by boys and men, and that someone has found a way to blame each of these women for being attacked.  Nothing can immunize these women from blame:  youth is not enough, being the attacker’s own daughter isn’t enough.  Even children, who can’t consent, are “asking for it,” in some cases presumably from their own fathers and friends.

I feel uneasy even pointing out that these were men who raped children.  I expect to be understood as a male-basher just for identifying the sex of those involved.  Yet many don’t hesitate to blame the victim, and implicitly all of womankind for their vulnerability.  Yes, I know, “victim” is not the politically correct word.  But nobody talks of “robbery survivors,” and I don’t want to imply that rape is some sort of routine trial for the strong to live through.

So, what to do?

The libertarians offer a very partial solution, which I do wholeheartedly support–the arming of women–but this is effective only against the small fraction of rapes which are committed by strangers.  Unfortunately it seems to be the only category of rape that libertarians and conservatives are routinely willing to acknowledge.  When they do acknowledge statistics showing that rape is widespread and perhaps worsening, they either:  deny them as paranoid concoctions of those harebrained feminists; or they blame the Sexual Revolution and the weakening of gender roles, which is, again, the fault of the feminists.

However, after reading Alternet’s “Why Do Men Catcall?” I suspect I’ve hit on some sort of solution of my own.  Feminists, always a problem, will probably object that it sounds too much like the stereotypical “woman’s intuition.”  But this is a step beyond, and far more impressive:  women merely have to attain psychic abilities.  This way, they will be able to detect whether or not a acquaintance, friend, date, relative, officer of the peace, or “liberating” soldier means them harm.  They will also be able to discern whether or not street harassment–itself often accompanied with joking and laughter–is merely harmless flattery, or will escalate into a brutal attack.  Since they are almost always blamed for their rapes, it is crucial that they develop these abilities.  (Abeer Qassim Hamza was harassed by soldiers for months before several finally decided to kill her and her family; her parents assumed they would “never attack a child.”)

I am not entirely being flip.  I’ve spent years trying to process the contradictory commands to women to “be careful,”  and nothing coherent has emerged, so I say:  attain supernatural mind-reading abilities!  Just be psychic, eliminate feminists, and girls can stop intruding upon others’ peace of mind with lurid stories of victimization.  The media’s got its hands full right now, what with the Richmond case and those of Polanski and Phillips.

Oh, but there’s this:  Reported Rapes hit 20-year low I further amend my conclusion:  become psychic, eliminate feminists, liberate technology.

This is What a Feminist Army Looks Like, II

I think you should read the excellent article by economics professor Marc W. Herold, “Killing the Innocents to Save ‘Our Troops’” posted at the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) website. I feel compelled to warn you that it has extremely graphic photos of airstrike victims, and also that it mistakenly identifies Rep. Ron Paul as an Independent rather than a Republican.

Herold discusses in detail the minimal monetary value that the U.S. attaches to Afghan casualties, in terms of the wrongful death amounts awarded. And since the majority of those casualties are women and children, we find that gender and age as well as color matter:

U.S aerial strikes were a chosen way of minimizing U.S casualties at the expense of Afghan civilian deaths and injured. In other words, a conscious self-serving U.S decision was made to impose undue harm upon Afghan civilians. That is a war crime. Moreover, as I have long argued and documented, some 60-70 percent of Afghan civilians killed by U.S and NATO forces have been women and children ⁽¹⁹⁾. That is another war crime!

Oh well.  Let’s look on the bright side: at least with air strikes, the victims of wartime rape, also predominantly women and children, just get incinerated, not assaulted and then killed.

But of course, to oppose this war means to oppose women’s rights, at least from the perspective of domestic feminists and human rights organizations.  As Herold notes:

Other American commentators – the humanitarian interventionists on Afghanistan – including Human Rights Watch, Sarah Chayes, Harvard’s Carr Center, etc. – present a completely idyllic end-game where jolly Afghan farmers labor in cooperatives producing pomegranates or saffron for export and Afghan girls’ schools dot the countryside. This has nothing to do with reality and all with marketing/selling the war to the American general public.

I’d add Code Pink and the Feminist Majority Foundation to that list of embarrassments.  The FMF piece, authored by Eleanor Smeal, approvingly notes that the Afghans are progressing toward her ideals of equality:

In the last seven years, there have been some successes. In 2000, girls were not allowed to attend school. Last year, the U.N. reported that 6 million children attended school. More than a third were girls. 49% of health care workers are women. Women comprise 25% of civil service workers.

Women also represent the majority of the civilian casualties, but strangely enough, Smeal leaves this out.  And neither Herold nor Smeal address exactly how many of these women and girls are in increased danger of rape due to the region’s instability.  But this shouldn’t be too surprising, since FMF’s co-founder, Peg Yorkin, apparently approves of child rape, so long as the perpetrator is sufficiently talented and connected.  And who could be more connected than the USG? (To be fair, Yorkin did catch from her late producer husband a vicious case of Hollywood-itis, which leaves  its sufferers with a moral IQ less than that of Woody Allen’s.)

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eleanor-smeal/why-is-the-fmf-refusing-t_b_234595.html

I kind of said this already

Pro-choice activist Jennie Bristow of spiked writes in Population reduction: a war on women’s bodies that

There is now great sensitivity surrounding explicit population-control programmes that have been used by governments in the developed world, and imposed on countries in the developing world. Today there is little sympathy within the West for continuing population control programmes such as China’s One-Child Policy, which is being relaxed in some districts of China. However, it would be naïve to assume from this that birth control today is always promoted positively, with the only considerations being women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Old arguments about why women’s personal reproductive decisions should be made to fit with broader social objectives can be recycled in new forms, and this requires continued vigilance from those working to promote the cause of genuine reproductive choice.

…[P]ro-choice advocates have fought their arguments on the basis that the woman should be absolutely at the centre of reproductive decision-making. It is a woman who must bear a child, and in our society it is usually she who will have the practical, emotional and financial responsibility for raising that child. To attempt to displace the woman from this decision by encouraging her to regulate her fertility in line with the abstract demands of ‘the environment’ implicitly pushes the woman to a more marginal, negotiable and ultimately vulnerable position in the decision-making process.

I have written previously that population control under the guise of environmentalism will be used to destroy women and children.  What is really naïve, though, is the notion that birth control was today or ever “promoted positively, with the only consideration being women’s rights and bodily autonomy.”  Many men have welcomed birth control because it has relieved them of responsibility, while mainstream feminists rarely think of “reproductive choice” as anything other than choosing to prevent or terminate pregnancies.  (This is why they are often deafeningly silent on the subject of maternal and infant health, for instance.)  Since the feminists have embraced collectivism, anything that might hold back the professional advancement of one woman is seen as damaging the “movement” as a whole.

Now, of course, fertile women will be seen as damaging not just to the feminist movement, but the environment as well.  I predict that women will be as sexualized as ever, if not more so, but the pressure to have fewer children will only ramp up.  From observing the mixed reactions to the 30-year-old Polanski case, for instance, it becomes apparent that even 13-year-old children don’t get to say no, especially to powerful older men.   So to save the environment, enable rapists, and boost the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line, we should probably just start all girls on mandatory birth control upon reaching adolescence.  (Hey, they did it with Gardasil!)  Everyone wins!

I’m sure the above sounds cynical, but I truly would not be surprised if mandatory birth control for girls is proposed within the next decade.  I’m sure there are people who want to propose it right now.  And, lo and behold, a Google search for “mandatory birth control” yields, among many other gems, the Facebook page awkwardly entitled “The Planet Being Saved By Mandatory Birth Control.  We’re doomed, y’all!

[UPDATE]:  As I mention in the comments, I think I was wrong to allege that feminists are “deafeningly silent” on maternal and infant health.  For instance, Pushed:  the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care, which challenges the rise of obstetric intervention,  was written by a feminist and former editor of Ms. magazine.  I think these texts are nonetheless relatively rare in the feminist/gender studies canon.

Oh, Lord.

The HuffPo tells us that the Conservative Bible Project Cuts Out Liberal Passages.  Thank God someone is getting on this.  Here is what the Conservative Bible Project tells us they are trying to address:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations.

As a tyke, I never thought to be suspicious of the New York Times version of the Bible that I was raised on.  Surely the good God-fearing Republicans in my family should have known to pick up the Rush Limbaugh translation as soon as it became available.

Anyway, the Conservative Bible Project has handily broken down what’s wrong with the King James Version of the Bible:

There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

The Bible is too liberal.  This would be news to some.  Oh, and it’s too vague!  Also news.  Let’s look at their ten commandments for what to cut out:

1.  Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

You hear that, Catholics?  Christianity isn’t macho enough.  It may be your fault.  Get those Madonna and child images out of here and replace them with pictures of Jesus looking appropriately ripped.  Thanks.

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level

Make the Bible less accessible!  Good idea.  Too many people are reading it, right?

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

“Volunteer” is a powerful conservative term?  Have they heard how Obama’s been using it?

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census

Don’t forget to change the soft Biblical euphemisms for “web addiction” and “Crackberries.”

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

Huh??

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Yeah, skip the MBA and go straight to seminary.  I’ve heard Biblical justifications for Christian anarchism and socialism alike; they can’t both be right.  Tax-collectors and prostitutes are lumped together, yet Jesus throws the moneylenders out of the temple, and we’re warned that rich men won’t get into heaven.  I think the Bible is pretty shaky as an econ textbook.

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

I like how the “adulteress story“–where Jesus tells the crowd that “He without sin may cast the first stone”–is particularly objectionable.  It is easy to see how it is threatening to conservatives of a certain stripe.  “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,” or “Judge not, that ye be not judged” aren’t anywhere near as troubling to the modern conservative.  However, a parable with essentially the same message, but which implies that sluts might be let off scot-free, is objectionable.  Got it.

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels

Elevate the contributions of the young, even while you rewrite the Bible so it can’t be comprehended by most children.

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Wait, what?  Is this how I’ll know I’m in a blue state:  people yell “Oh my Jehovah!” when surprised or hurt?

Well, I do hope this project takes off.  They really need to delete the passages where Jesus lobbies the Romans to raise taxes to care for the poor and sick, instead of serving them himself; I’ve grown tired of hearing them quoted by Christian liberals in the healthcare debates.  (Jesus’s story is a really good example of working within the system to achieve your goals, just as the Romans are a great example of the benevolent State.)  While they’re cutting passages, I hope they remember to bring back the good ones that the damned Kennedy-loving Bible scholars left out.  You know that one where Jesus interrupted his ministering to the poor (he was director of a great nonprofit set up for that) to beat the crap out of some local men suspected of having sexual relations with one another?  Oh, you haven’t?  Isn’t that all the evidence you need to suspect a homosexual, liberal agenda at work behind the KJV?

Maybe, Just Maybe, Environmentalism is Hostile to Women

Death (and Sterilization) By Government « LewRockwell.com Blog.

Karen De Coster writes:

John P. Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, has, surprisingly, received little mainstream press on his crazed worldviews. Thus, every so often I like to post a reminder for people that may spur them to do some additional research on their own.  Here’s a short editorial from the Washington Times to remind us of Holdren’s book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, that he co-wrote with Paul and Anne Ehrlich (the Times article commits a spelling error on the last name). From the Times editorial:

In case compulsory abortion wasn’t enough to diffuse his imaginary population bomb, Mr. Holdren and the Erlichs considered other extremist measures. “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men,” they wrote. “The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control.”

It gets worse. The Holdren-Erlich book also promotes “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.” After noting that, well, yes, there were “very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems,” Mr. Holdren and his co-authors express hope that their idea may still be viable. “To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements,” they wrote. “It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets or livestock.”

Wow.  So much for the idea that environmentalism is about getting back to Mother Earth or revering womankind, as some eco-feminists might claim.  This passage makes it sound like just about everyone and everything–”members of the opposite sex,” “children,” and “livestock”–have a greater claim to existence than women’s fertility.

At least the Erlichs and Holdren have made it plain.  All the claims of environmentalism–that we emit too much carbon, use too many resources, or hurt too many animals–will ultimately be made on women’s bodies.  There will be the show of attacking traditionally male-oriented industrialization and production, but ultimately the blame will fall on women, for having babies either when the region is too poor (say, in the dark continent) or too rich (America.)  Women are the wretched culprits and should be punished accordingly by coercive sterilization or worse.  Was someone telling me that Western Christianity oppressed women and that green socialism would set me free?  Eve may have been kicked out of the garden, but at least she got to keep her kids.

Oops, I Forgot About Garden-Variety Misogyny

Sports Misogyny and the Court of Public Opinon | The American Prospect

Jesus Christ God:

In mid July, a Harrah’s hotel worker accused Pittsburgh Steelers star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger of raping her, and her employer of covering it up. And then, as reliably as thunder follows lightning, the sports misogyny apologists boomed onto the scene. You know the ones — would-be or former jocks with Peter Pan disease, women desperate to be one of the guys, or who dream of being Gisele Bundchen to the next Tom Brady. They all cling to their game and their team above everything else, including evidence, compassion and logic. And whenever it’s suggested that a sports practice or athlete harms women, they jump into action with whatever excuse is handy: It’s all in good fun! It’s just part of the game! It could have been worse! He would never do that! She liked it! She’s just after his money! Can’t anyone take a joke?

…This kind of public blowback isn’t just re-traumatizing for the victim — it impacts our ability to bring rapists to justice. After all, judges and juries live in the same sports culture we do — and participate in it themselves to varying degrees. So it’s not hard to guess why a study by USA Today in the wake of the Kobe Bryant rape trial found that athletes charged with rape were far less likely to be convicted or even agree to a plea deal than non-athletes.

I know I complain a lot about the hidden misogyny in the policies feminists pursue, but damn, it’s easy to see why feminists get desperate and turn to force in the attempt to achieve their goals.  It’s pretty easy to feel helpless in the face of overwhelming societal indifference to sexual assault.  I guess I could turn this into a rant about the feminist coddling of serial assaulter Bill Clinton, whose misogyny was excused not because he was good with a ball, but because he was a famous politician–but like I said, I’m just going to go with a straightforward condemnation of straight-up, all-American misogyny.  That alone could apparently keep one busy for a good long time.

This is What a Feminist Army Looks Like

Perhaps you’re sick of the story, but I never fail to be shocked and disgusted anew at watching so-called feminists cozy up to the war machine (like it’s a new vibrator! Couldn’t resist.) From Tom Hayden at the HuffPo:

Pentagon Enlists Feminists for War Aims

Over a decade ago a young woman approached me on the California Senate floor with a petition against the Taliban. Women are being repressed, tortured and killed by religious fundamentalists, she said. I signed on. The Taliban seemed like a Ku Klux Klan aimed at women. I was disgusted that the State Department and oil companies would negotiate with them over pipelines, with cursory regard for women’s rights. I still feel that way.

But I had no idea then that I was joining The Feminist Majority in a coalition with the Pentagon to invade and occupy Afghanistan. Given the respect I have for Ellie Smeal and Kathy Spillar, among others, it’s still hard to believe that they think Afghan women can be liberated by an invading, bombing, imprisoning American army. It’s hard to believe that Predators, drones, Special Forces, detention camps and foreign occupiers are solutions to Taliban fundamentalism.

It was so easy to see through Bush’s claims that the war in Iraq had anything to do with advancing women’s rights there. But Obama’s war in Afghanistan is somehow a different story. I’d say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is supposedly indicative of psychosis, but what do I know? Psychiatry, as we know, is sexist. War, on the other hand, has always been an indispensable tool in advancing feminist agendas. Right?

Unfortunately, we are dealing with statist-minded feminists who think that because increased government intervention has not yet solved the problem, the only solution is to escalate the intervention. Let’s look at how much Western occupation has already accomplished:

Even the US-supported Kabul government showed its real character this year by passing a law requiring women to obey their husbands in sexual matters, in violation of the country’s own constitution and international norms.

A top United Nations official this month told a Kabul audience “that violence against women is not being challenged or condemned.” This was eight years following the Bonn Agreement which included human rights at its core. In northern areas under Western occupation, the UN report found that in 39 percent of rapes “that perpetrators were directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation.”

It’s safe to say the Kabul government will not be recognizing any NOW chapters among its local non-governmental organizations in the foreseeable future.

That is probably for the best. If the feminists think bombs are the answer, who needs enemies?

The FMF is not only wrong, but also evasive:

The Feminist Majority chooses to be uncharacteristically obscure in advocating more American troops as the solution. Its website speaks of more “peacekeeping forces” rather than an escalation of the occupation. They write that “virtually everyone knows that a military solution alone won’t work. Yet, we cannot ignore that security and the Taliban are among Afghans’ top concerns”, whatever that means. They quote an Afghan human rights activist, Sima Simar, who obliquely says “security must be re-established until the Afghan army and police can take over.” But they fail to note that the current Pentagon plan for establishing an Afghan security force will take at least ten more years.

Within some feminist circles it is practically a truism that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” yet the FMF seems all too eager to get their hands on the Pentagon’s tools:

The Feminist Majority is being used by the Pentagon to advance its war aims. Perhaps they believe they are using the Pentagon, though they don’t say it. One result is division and confusion within the peace movement. In soliciting support from genuine peace groups for Afghanistan, for example, The Feminist Majority is less than candid that the funds are linked to the escalation of the war.

My headline promised to show you what a feminist army looks like. Unfortunately, it looks an awful lot like this:

Steven Green

US ex-soldier guilty of Iraq rape

Chris Hedges, in his book “What Every Person Should Know About War,” reports that “in peacetime, male U.S. military personnel are less likely to commit rape than are male civilians of the same age. In the heightened aggression of combat, all violent acts are more common, including rape.” This means rape of the civilian population as well as their fellow soldiers: according to the LA Times article “Rapists in the Ranks,” women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

I doubt that American feminists would want an army of men with guns to set them free from perceived abuses, yet they are all too willing to ship them overseas, where the men are known to become more violent. Many of these feminists are probably slightly put off by guns, men with guns, and especially groups of men with guns, but this distaste seems to evaporate as soon as it comes to forcing feminist agendas in remote lands. Your average feminist, particularly a lefty one, is probably disgusted by the attendees at a NASCAR race, for heaven’s sake; but replace their beers with AK-47s and put them in service of supposedly women-friendly goals, and everything’s suddenly fine?

If these feminists are at all honest, and not simply in love with power for power’s sake, then they are inadvertently making the same mistake that conservatives are often guilty of: assuming that a government which bumbles at home is going to suddenly accomplish its stated goals, efficiently and compassionately, as soon as you give it guns, planes and money. But, as painful as it is to say here, it is increasingly difficult for me to believe that mainstream feminists have women’s best interests at heart. The pursuit of power seems to have superseded the desire for equality.

Incidentally, from the statement Steven Green read at his conviction, it seems that he learned the hard and horrible way that war tends to bring out the worst in a soldier. What does it mean when a convicted rapist and former soldier can see that war is wrong and repent his involvement in it, but comfortable stateside feminists cannot?

Before I was in the Army, I never thought I would kill anyone, and even after I was in the Army, but before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying that I lost my mind. At some point while I was in Iraq, I stopped seeing Iraqi’s as good and bad, as men, women, and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human. When that happened, any natural, learned, or religious morality, that normally would have stopped this, was gone.

…I know that I have done evil, and I fear that the wrath of the Lord will come upon me on that day. But, I hope that you and your family at least can find some comfort in God’s justice.

I see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is intrinsically evil. And, I am sorry I ever had anything to do with either.

Torture at Home

I wonder how many of these women subjected to such obscene cruelty are nonviolent offenders:

Giving Birth in Shackles

Last week, New York legislators passed landmark legislation on an issue that has received far less public attention and debate than waterboarding and sleep deprivation, but that involves the same core issues of human dignity and protection from cruel treatment: the shackling of incarcerated women during pregnancy and childbirth.

As the legislation awaits his signature, Governor David Paterson should reflect on the accounts of shackling shared by Women on the Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH), an association of formerly incarcerated women. The accounts include the following words from Tina:

“The evening when I was to give birth I was transported to Valhalla hospital in handcuffs, I was in labor. When I arrived at the hospital and was about to give birth to my son the doctor who was to deliver my child requested that shackles be removed. The correctional officer released one of my legs. I remained tethered to the gurney during labor and child birth and when my son was to be held in my arms I only held him in one arm because that was all I was allowed by the officer who witnessed the birth of my son. I was not a flight risk! I felt dehumanized and unworthy to be treated in such a way.”

Our tax dollars paid this officer to maintain a menacing watch over the birth of this poor woman’s son? Really? Well, come to think of it, I do feel so much safer knowing that there are men keeping women monitored and at last half-manacled when they are most likely to go on homicidal rampages: in the throes of childbirth. And I’m sure the “correctional officer” made a great midwife on the spot. Maybe America isn’t as hostile to midwifery as I had been previously led to believe, or maybe it’s fine so long as meddlesome women are replaced by men in uniform.

So glad we don’t live under anarchy. Think of the potential abuses! Misogyny and cruel, unusual punishment might go unchecked! <shudder>

(Even if you are indifferent to the suffering of the mother, it doesn’t stand to reason that her innocent child should also be punished. There is a lot of research showing that stressful births can impact the child’s health immediately as well as later on in life. It’s difficult to doubt that chains and scrutiny make birthing more stressful.)

Women and The State

“I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.” –Mary Wollstonecraft

Ms. magazine cover, 2009:

I’ve been struck again and again by the way the citizenry’s relationship to the State resembles nothing so much as Battered Wife Syndrome, even (or especially) if you take into account the studies showing that male partners are victimized by domestic abuse as frequently as female ones. Here is The Superfluous Man on the topic of the liberals’ desperate codependence on the State (and yes, he refers you to my earlier post on the matter), in Hope and desperation:

Like a drowning man, people threatened with the destruction of hope will cling to anything. People will try to justify or rationalize the failures and the betrayals of promises. People will reconcile themselves to things that would have rightly appalled them if Bush had done it. (See Cheryl Cline’s recent post for an example.) Some of that is just cynical partisan politicking, but I think a lot of it is sincere- the death of a beloved hope is so agonizing that people often warp or just deny their own perceptions to avoid that pain. This is a common phenomenon that we’ve all probably witnessed. It’s not hard to find relationships and marriages where one partner is blatantly unfaithful, exploitative, or abusive, and yet the victimized partner has convinced himself or herself that things are okay, that their partner is a good person who loves them.

The nauseating spectacle of the inauguration made this sickeningly apparent. The same government that brutalizes us sells itself as our savior, and the populace responds with an ecstasy that is sexual or even religious in its intensity. The parallels to an abusive relationship are almost too obvious to go into: the abuser is unpredictable and cruel but occasionally sweet and loving, and, most importantly, gives the illusion of consent via voting and physical residence (“Why don’t you leave if you don’t like it?” To go where?)

With women, however, the comparison of liberal self-delusion to domestic abuse hits home excruciatingly hard, especially since women are more likely to identify as Democrats. Women have labored too long to allow women to control their own lives and livelihoods only to surrender it all to the State. A woman who labors unpaid for her family is, at least in some circles, considered a gullible tool of the patriarchy, a brainwashed slave; a woman who forgoes childrearing or curtails it drastically just to hand over half her earnings to the State is considered liberated. A woman who takes care of her own children is somehow selfish and deluded and self-abnegating all at once, whereas a woman whose labor is ostensibly taxed to care for the children of others, but in reality is used to fund war and genocide, represents the pinnacle of feminist aspirations. (She is selfish to place a higher premium on her own reproduction than on her family’s carbon footprint, for instance; self-abnegating in that she’s bought into an outdated model of femininity.)

Feminist-minded women have long been critical, and rightly so, of power structures that are replicated via the family. But this skepticism of private patriarchy somehow evaporates when it comes to the public patriarchy of the State, and its overwhelmingly brutal and obvious power structures. Rad Geek has just one example of how this public patriarchy takes care of women in his series on sexual violence perpetrated by cops: Rapists in uniform #5: on invasions of privacy. He also examines the ceaseless rationalizations of monopolistic state power that people resort to:

When anarchists suggest that a civilized society can do without government or its cops, we are always asked how people in an anarchistic society would be protected from violent criminals like murderers and rapists. If we suggest that people could handle their own protection through consensual private arrangements — individual self-defense, cooperative community defense, or hiring out help, if need be — we are constantly told that we need monopolistic government control in order to ensure that professional police go about their policing in a way that’s transparent and accountable to the people.

A woman who said her husband needed absolute control over the family to ensure its members’ accountability would get laughed out of the Ms. board room, and quite a few other places too. The feeble offering that, say, his drinking buddies would provide a series of checks and balances on that power would turn the laughter to plain pity. But apologists for state power, like a codependent woman offering excuses for an alcoholic partner, never run out of ways to justify centralizing authority.  This power is justified, paradoxically, by appealing to illusions of individual sovereignty:  under the protective wing of federal government and federal funding, we could agitate for “local control,” increase “community involvement,” improve education, get journalists to vigilantly cover abuses, ad infinitum. The battered woman could hide the liquor bottles, too: giving a show of disapproval and agency, but in effect merely enabling the abuser.

Of course, there’s the equally inescapable conclusion that women and citizens are not mere victims, but actively collude and identify with the mechanisms of power, as the Ms. cover all too clearly demonstrates. It’s not that we ever achieved and then forgot Wollstonecraft’s vision, but rather that it was never honored to begin with.

Savage Rant

I have some long and difficult posts planned, so naturally I wound up tuning in to the Savage Love podcast instead of working on them. I often disagree with Savage’s politics, particularly his desire to restrict public smoking and ban gum cigarettes, but he is an entertaining columnist overall. What I have noticed during the years of reading his columns and, more recently, listening to his podcast, is that he seems to answer inquiries from quite a few sexual assault survivors. Here is one of the most recent. I don’t know if he is selecting these letters and calls because he has an especial concern with the issue, or if he receives a large number of them and his answers are in direct proportion to the number of inquiries received.

So it isn’t a random sample, certainly. But in any case, it’s disturbing, and brings me to a rant about an issue that’s bothered me for a very long time. I’ve had more than one male acquaintance relate a certain story of male privilege, with a moral that happens to go completely over their heads. It goes something like this: a woman tells the man something along the lines of, “Well, it’s safe for you to walk home at night, because you’re a guy,” and the man apparently thinks, “What, do you think you’re all that and everyone wants to get with you?” As infuriating as this is, it gets worse, because they can’t be the only guys who see things this way. It’s like an infestation of roaches—if you can actually see one or two, you can be sure there are jillions just out of sight. Not only are women to be blamed for the assaults they endure—for not being able to prevent or avoid them—they are also ridiculed for being aware of the threat in the first place and for even thinking about taking steps to avoid it. (Lest I seem to blame only men, I’ll point out that organizations such as NOW do their part in both psychologically and physically disarming women.)

From this sentiment—that regular women are fools to worry about walking alone at night—we are to extract that unattractive or average-looking women are immune to assault. Never mind that attractiveness is hardly objective (yes, I know all about hip-waist ratios and so forth; I suppose only women with the magical 2/3 ratio need worry about attack.) The only possible victims are supermodels, apparently, and there’s only about six in the world, which means the statistics on sexual assault are about as inflated as Zimbabwean currency (and shortly the U.S. dollar, no doubt.) So, feminists, stop your bitching and rejoice! It isn’t one in four, or even one in fifty; it’s 1 in a billion! God, women really can’t do math, not even the crazy harridans who complain about trivialities like sexual assault, or about trivialization itself.

I think I’ll find a nice coming-out story or something in the Savage Love archives now, as my back-of-the-envelope calculations have failed to soothe me. (I have an envelope I keep handy for recording all my rape calculations. It’s better than a Moleskine. Or Excel.)