Author: Margaret

Women\'s Rights and the Decline of Democracy

As I have been watching and reading about the protests that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak I have more than once been struck by the fact that many of the \”horrible conditions\” that commentators spoke of in Egypt are also present in American life today. Indeed some, such as increasing social inequality, are actually worse in the United States than in Egypt. Yet the American commentators I listened to on American television almost to a person talked down to the protesters of Egypt from the Olympian heights of an achieved democracy.

I leave to another day a discussion of the paternalistic and colonial presumptions that laid behind much of their rhetoric. Today I am  examining one the premises that underlay their patronizing comments.

PREMISE: The United States of America is a functioning democracy.

 I think it is reasonable to question to the stability of democracy in the United States today and to have rather gloomy expectations for its future. I am not alone in this questioning and it is not only those on the loony fringes of political thought who share my concerns. Read, for example, Bob Herbert\’s opinion piece When Democracy Weakens in today\’s New York times.

At this point the reader may be assuming that I intend to write about the ways in which the rights women have won in the United States will be weakened as democracy is undercut. I would agree that the weakening of women\’s rights and the weakening of democratic rights go hand in hand but I would argue that the former is not a result of the latter as much as the latter is being achieved by means of the former.

Even if one looks to the American political parties and political movements that have been historically the greatest friends of the rights of American women one finds a disturbing willingness to treat the rights of women as negotiating points. Consider, if you will, the outcry that would arise if Democratic members of congress were willing to negotiate away the rights of African-Americans to whole areas of health care in return for a few Republican votes on an upcoming bill. Yet that is exactly what they have been willing to do to women. Since, apparently, the guaranteed right of every woman to life saving medical care is optional to many of the members of the house and senate, the health care bill they passed was written without a guarantee of universality of treatment. Of course in the future those limitations will be extended to include more and more Americans but the opening necessary to make that future gutting possible exists because the vast majority of political representatives, both Democratic and Republican, don\’t really believe the rights of women to be equal to those of men.

Similarly, if you look at the many programs that the Obama administration has slated to be gutted or canceled in order to cut the budget, those that serve the needs of women are disproportionately represented. Why, one might ask? Because these are the programs that the elected representatives of the American people are least likely to fight for. Will the kyriarchy stop at these programs? Of course not. Indeed even now it is not only the programs that primarily serve women that are under attack. But it is those programs that will slashed with the least amount of effective outrage. And so democracy slows dies.

The pattern is clear. If the powers that be wish to successfully to carve away at the rights of the public in general the best place to start is with the rights of women.
  

When realism and cynicism collide

Whenever I wonder if my attitude towards real, lasting changes in the power and status of women is overly cynical some real world event comes along to show that I am not being cynical enough.

Haiti\’s cataclysmic earthquake killed hundreds of thousands, left this capital in ruins and sent more than a million people into a life in crowded, squalid camps.

It also devastated a strong and surprisingly successful women\’s movement, which, a year later, struggles like the rest of the nation to recover, even as women are being subjected to horrific sexual violence.

 \”We started receiving reports of rapes from the very first day after the quake,\” said Jocie Philistin, one of the women who run Kofaviv. \”At first we thought, this can\’t be true! But it was.\”

Whatever \’state of nature\’ or \’breakdown of civil society\’ means for men it guarantees one thing for women: sexual violence. Among the ruins of Haiti women are being systematically stalked by gangs of rapists. It matters not if the woman is old enough to be a grandmother or young enough to still be described as a toddler. She is female and therefore the nature prey of men. 

Young women are easy prey for uneducated, unemployed men who populate the camps, often stoned and with time on their hands. They see women and girls as fair game. 

The men in authority are no better:

Many women have denounced camp leaders, always male, for demanding sexual favors in return for tents, food and building materials.

It is sad that I am not surprised to read about what is happening in Haiti. It is sad that I am not surprised that we are hearing so little about what is happening in Haiti. Damage to women, it appears, is always acceptable collateral damage. Protecting women is seldom the first goal of rescue/aid missions and indeed it often the very last. It is only after life has returned to normal for the men in a community that the needs, concerns, fears, safety and health of the women will be addressed.

If then.

Re: reading as a tool against hegemony OR Rereading as a tool against hegemony

It is dreadfully difficult for the fish to see the ocean in which they swim. That is one of the strengths of any hegemonic system. It is difficult for those living within it to realize that they are, indeed, living \”within\” a construct when so much of what they see seems natural, right and normal.

One of best ways to demonstrate hegemony induced blindness is to read a book one first read several decades ago. [I would suggest watching a television show or a movie but changes in production value can make it difficult to see past the technological changes to issues of social construction.] One finds upon rereading the book that apparently an evil genie crept into the text during the intervening years to change everything from language to plot details to aspects of characterization. \”How could I have missed that!\” one cries.

One missed it the first time for the same reason that fish do not notice the water–because it was such an automatic and unquestioned part of the universe in which one lived that it barely impinged on one\’s consciousness. One missed it because the reader and the author shared the same prejudices, understandings and stereotypes.

And as you put down the book or come to the last frame of the movie perhaps you should take a moment to wonder about all of the other things one had taken for granted or not noticed.

The invisibility of misogyngy

While this article Maybe Jared Loughner Was a Bigot, After All in Slate magazine supports my argument that Loughner’s attack on Giffords was motivated, at least in part, by misogyny it also serves as an example of the invisibility of misogyny.

Look again at the headline. Loughner, the reader is told, is a bigot. Yes, misogynists are bigots. They are a particular type of bigot. If most of someone’s writing is about Jewish conspiracies to take over the world we call them anti-Semitic. If a writer’s output is dominated by claims about the ‘yellow menace’ we call them racist. Yet when a man publicly argues that women should not be allowed to hold positions of authority Slate calls him a bigot.

Tom Scocca, the author of the Slate piece, makes the argument that The New York Times article buries and obscures the importance of Loughner’s atttitude towards women.

These bits of information appear in the 17th and 90th paragraphs of the Times story, a story dedicated to the thesis that the facts surrounding Loughner are “a curlicue of contradictory moments open to broad interpretation.”

Scocca’s argument that The New York Times was ignoring the importance of Loughner’s misogyny was partially buried by the Slate editorial decision as to the appropriate headline for the story.

If Scocca himself had been a woman this treatment of his piece would have been even more ironic but I suspect that if Scocca had been a woman her editors would not have taken her argument seriously enough to publish it.