Mockery: Women’s new weapon
From a sex strike to satirical anti-Viagra bills, the war on reproductive rights has some responding with laughs
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/mockery_womens_new_weapon/singleton/
I feel strongly about this whole GOP assault on women, but haven’t really articulated my thoughts here. I have read several articles that had me on the point of posting, but didn’t have any thoughts organized enough to put down. I think this article was the activation energy I needed, hopefully I can articulate something meaningful…
I think that the general reason why historically women allow men to be in charge is two fold. One is men tend to greet resistance with violence and women (in general, there are plenty of exceptions on both sides) tend to resist meeting the men in kind. Second, I think that women (again, in general) have evolved methods of getting most of what they wanted anyway, so were (more or less) content with standing behind the throne and directing events from there. Based on my reading of history, the societies where women have substantial control of events (btw, here in the US at this point we are NOT at one of those states!) tended to be few and far between and were often overthrown by male invaders intent on destroying the female society (meaning not on wars of conquest (where they could be bought off), but wars of destruction and domination). I have read about more instances where women were factors at the very top of society (empress, queen, prime minister, Pharaoh, etc.) and while women, in general, might have experienced a more positive environment (perhaps better described as less negative), the trend was generally quickly reversed when a man took over. I suppose that women have evolved to be less adversarial with men largely because of their dependence on men during the child bearing and rearing process. Just imagine how much more difficult it would be for a stone-age single woman to bear and rear children! (I could envision, though, a society (much like elephants) where it is female dominated and men really are just sperm donors; it just seems like humans took a different path.)
Interestingly (to me, anyway), recent thoughts on human evolution suggest that one of the things that sets us apart is that early men used to hunt and bring their kills back to the womenfolk. It seems that there is a very critical period during pregnancy and shortly after birth where the _failure_ to get certain lipids and fatty acids in the mother/child diet leads to a lifetime’s worth of smaller cognitive capacity. Calculations have shown that even with the man producing only a few percentages worth of calories for the family, if those calories are supplied during the critical periods of child bearing and rearing the children will be much more likely to realize their cognitive potential (i.e., get bigger brains). Since gathering is a rather intensive process (though one that can be done during most of pregnancy and nearly all of rearing) it makes sense (at least until the invention of herding so as to always have a ready supply of the necessary nutrients) that women who did NOT put up with men and their irrational and often violent outbursts fared less well than those women who put up with our idiosyncratic behavior. Over long periods of time that would put a lot of pressure on what evolved into humans to have very different behaviors between sexes.
I think that when we (as a species) are in eras where appropriate food is fairly plentiful and women can get what they need for bearing and rearing there is much less pressure for them (women) to put up with our (men) crap. Today is is rather trivial for a single woman to bear and raise a (or several) child so there is less pressure from society against women who get ‘uppity’ to be ostracized or in any other way punished. Conversely (and this where the GOP seems to be), this means that men have to give up some of their cherished notions, such as the ‘ownership’ of women (and their wombs!). Men, being the irrational and violent beasts that they are (consider that the men who were poor hunters during our evolutionary history were underrepresented in the population, via good old Darwinian survival of the fittest) don’t cotton to giving up any power (even though, as I mentioned in the beginning, much of that power was illusory as I expect women have been in control for most of our history), hence this push back among people who call themselves ‘conservatives’. “If we could only return to the days of yore when women had to engage in back breaking work all day just to raise children we wouldn’t have to put up with all this damn talk about women all the damn time!”
I hope that with this latest folderol regarding the GOP’s efforts to restrict women’s ownership of their reproductive rights will be enough to reverse this trend we have been seeing for the last couple of decades. At least this election cycle has shown the GOP’s ‘anti-abortion’ efforts for what they really are (shoving women back into the kitchen) so those who truly object to abortion (but are otherwise happy with reproductive rights) can focus on that (I have read some very persuasive epidemiological studies that show that with greater access to lower cost contraception there are vastly fewer abortions, so the true anti-abortion activist should be working toward the goal of universal availability of contraception) instead of supporting these assholes that just want to return to the ‘good old days of yore when women were too damn busy to have a voice’.
As for how to help champion women’s rights? That I am not sure. At the federal level supporting the democrats basically means supporting a guy who (despite being a ‘Constitutional scholar’) shreds the Constitution, assassinates US citizens and works steadily to erode the bits of privacy we have left. Certainly at local contests not all GOP-backed candidates are so focused on ending women’s rights and there are plenty of so-called ‘blue dog’ democrats whose voting record makes it clear they are quite happy pushing women back into the kitchen. It is easy to say, for instance, that electing Santorum would be a massive step backwards for women, not as easy for Romney (though the Mormon church is certainly not friendly to women (that is, when they are anything but barefoot and pregnant)) and downright impossible to figure for Gingrich (Paul, it seems to me, is mostly in line with Santorum, not that there is any chance Paul will be the GOP candidate). Since it still seems quite apparent that Romney will be the GOP candidate it seems clear to focus on him. It is clear that you can’t trust him, he has a history of being anti-women’s rights (in his church, anyway) and has been forced into that direction because of the asinine hold that the conservative whack jobs in the Tea Party (which, to me, seem clearly intent on getting those damn women back into the kitchen and locking the door). Of course, that inability to trust him works both ways; if he happened to build his government with pro-women’s rights people he could easily ‘turn’ on the Tea Partiers.
You know that sexism, like racism, is still prevalent in our society when someone feels obliged to make sexist statements like this to try to make a point:
My best friend is a woman and several of my closest friends are women!
I’m all for these women standing up on their hind legs and telling men how the cow eats the corn. The problem with the women’s movement so far has been that the top-dawg women have been more like men than women.