Why Can't A Woman...Be More Like A Man?

Good question, Professor!

Individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy - the principles behind our understanding of consent - were the principles upon which many of us assume the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision was based, although the case itself was focused on a citizen's right to privacy around making decisions concerning her bodily autonomy and medical care.  Laws which deny a woman the right to bodily autonomy - including laws that deny a woman the right to control what happens to her own body in favor of giving any potential fetus the "right" to use her body against her will or without her consent - are an unconstitutional denial of individual freedom because they relegate a woman to a legal status that is less than human. The legal precedent that a woman actually has the right to consent to the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy, and an equal right to decline consent to those risks and responsibilities was thought to be finally established by Roe v Wade. But since it was argued as a case for privacy, Roe v Wade has never been a guarantee of women's reproductive rights. It has always been vulnerable to attack, either through court challenges or through legislation which has chipped away at it.

One way or another, the
Republican Party will find
a way to control those sluts!

From the moment Roe v Wade was decided, the religious right began working to overturn it. Outraged that women had at last been granted the right to choose if and when to be pregnant -  a right which conflicted with the patriarchal order which demands that men have complete authority over women - the "moral majority" began a campaign of slut-shaming, raising the specter- never far beneath the surface in any misogynist culture - that uncontrolled women would engage in wildly promiscuous and "irresponsible" sex and darkly warning that the new law would bring about the downfall of American civil society  However, when this tactic initially only gained traction within the most conservative and misogynistic segments of society, conservatives realized that the problem was that a majority of Americans in the late 1970's actually respected a woman's right to choose - and that most Americans believed that the consensual sexual activity of women was no more society's business than the consensual sexual activity of men. Conservatives began to cast around for a way to undermine that public perception that women should be entitled to civil rights equal to men.

Religious conservatives soon zeroed in on "consent" as a potentially malleable concept that they might be able to use to drive a wedge between women and their human rights, thereby setting the stage to put women back in their traditional place.  In order to overcome the legal issue of consent, religious and political conservatives began working tirelessly - using tactics including slut-shaming, inserting abstinence-only purity campaigns into public schools, and falsely equating microscopic blastocysts with full term babies - to entrench the notion that recreational sex involving the conscious avoidance of pregnancy is shameful and that only marital sex which welcomes the prospect of conception should be recognized and supported by society. Their aim was to increase public acceptance of explicitly Christian sexual mores in order to garner voter support for their social agenda. The ultimate goal was to get this explicitly Christian theology enshrined into law: that whenever a woman has consented to sex, she has automatically consented to pregnancy, too.

That's right, ladies, when you consent to sex, you consent to
pregnancy. And when you don't consent to sex, you
consent to pregnancy, too! You and your uteri are in a perpetual
state of consent to pregnancy! Ain't patriarchy grand?

Eventually, extreme conservatives began to worry that exceptions for rape and incest could possibly become a loophole through which some lying women could escape unwanted pregnancy, leading to the push for the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest as legal justifications for abortion. Building on the false premise that a conceptus is equal to a full-term baby, conservatives argued that a fertilized egg, no matter how it came into existence, is an innocent life deserving of protection. Completely ignoring the question of whether a woman who has been raped is deserving of society's protection and adroitly sidestepping Roe v Wade, forced-birth groups wrote bills denying abortion rights to women even in the case of rape or incest which their political arm, the Republican party, sponsored in state legislatures. In one giant leap of cruel imagination, conservatives managed to establish as a serious idea that even when a woman does not consent to sex, her consent to pregnancy should be automatic in the eyes of the law.

Lest there be any doubt about the intentions of the religious conservatives and their hired guns in the state and federal legislatures to render the legal notion of female consent completely irrelevant and completely powerless, forced-birth organizations created "personhood bills" which they instructed their Republican lackeys to sponsor and pass in various states. "Personhood" bills, if signed into law, would confer the full rights of a "person" - a deliberately vague term, but generally considered to be equal to a live-born child - to all fertilized ova. Such laws would criminalize most forms of female-controlled contraception, emergency contraception, assisted reproduction and, of course, all abortions. They would also open the door to state-sponsored invasion of women's privacy and health care rights since legally protected "persons" could potentially be "murdered" before a conception is discovered to have taken place. Furthermore, such laws would criminalize anyone who attempted to help a woman abort the conceptus "person" either by performing a surgical procedure, providing medical abortifacents, or driving a woman across state lines to obtain an abortion in a non-"Personhood" state.

Got that, gals?

"Personhood" laws are the holy grail of the forced-birth movement and the ultimate goal of religious conservatives. If passed, such laws would strip women of all bodily autonomy in matters of reproduction. Women would be denied effective female-controlled birth control, they would be denied emergency birth control if their partner's birth control fails or he refuses to use it and they would be denied abortions - even if they are impregnated by rape and even if their health or lives are endangered by a pregnancy. In short, thanks to the twisted culture of "life" pushed so ruthlessly onto them by religious conservatives, a woman would be compelled to sacrifice her happiness, risk her health and even lose her life because a single-celled conceptus has been granted a right to occupy her body which supersedes all of her rights including her humanity, her dignity and her right to life.

In essence, the goal of "personhood" laws is to elevate a cluster of cells to the full status of a man - and actually even to exceed that status because in no other situation can one person's needs compel another person to give up bodily autonomy, physical resources, health and safety (no American citizen is compelled to give so little as a pint of blood for another person, even if a life depends on it) - while reducing a pregnant woman to the status of a gestational vessel whose human rights have been totally subjugated for the purpose of reproduction, whether she has chosen to reproduce or not. These laws do not recognize "equally competing rights" of human beings who have equal status before the law. The woman's rights are erased while the blastocyst's "rights" become supreme.

Keep that contraception out
of those sluts' hands!

The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception.

Religious patriarchy allows society to label unplanned pregnancy a "women's issue" in spite of the fact that it takes both a man and a woman - both failing to use effective contraception - to create an unplanned pregnancy. The fact that society allows unplanned pregnancy to be framed as a women's issue reveals the depth of the unconscious misogyny which lays the responsibility for - and the consequences of - an unplanned pregnancy squarely in the woman's lap, while little thought - and almost no censure - is directed toward the "guilt", the "promiscuity" or the "irresponsibility" of the man involved.

You know the old joke about keeping 
women barefoot and pregnant?
Not so funny anymore.

More insidiously, when pregnancy and the laws restricting women's rights over when and if they will become pregnant is framed as a women's issue, conservatives ensure that half the population at least may ignore the very real danger to women's health and safety. Few men pay attention when women's rights are being stripped away because the phrase "women's issue" is unconsciously received as a signal that the subject is unimportant and less than men's other concerns. Even men who love the women in their lives are lulled into a false sense of "nothing to worry about" as their wives, their sisters and their daughters are slowly but surely reduced to the legal status of walking wombs compelled under threat of criminal prosecution to gestate the offspring of any man who succeeds in impregnating them - whether by mutual and loving consent, by accidental failure of birth control or by force.

In this way, the religious patriarchy ensures both that women cannot control their own reproduction completely (since women - even abstinent women - can be, and often are, the victims of forced impregnation) and that no man - not even a rapist - must accept the decision of a mere woman on the question of whether or not he can use her body to reproduce. That is because the "right to life" of a conceptus is, in fact, really just an extension of men's rights. A conceptus is always some man's potential offspring, and at its core, religious teaching is all about enshrining the right of every man to reproduce. If women are allowed the freedom to choose, some men would almost certainly have difficulty finding a willing mate with whom to procreate. Religions which enforce the authority of men over women and which restrict the freedom and choices of women therefore speak to the root of cultural misogyny - men's fear of the potential power of women to control their (men's) ability to reproduce. "Right to life" is actually the trojan horse by which male rights over women are being inserted directly into women's uteri. That's right, ladies. It's a great big Biblically-condoned 'fuck you'!

Make no mistake. God's Own Party is
determined to restore Christian patriarchy
at the cost of women's human rights.

While religions pay lip service to condemning male brutality, merely offering verbal assurances on how a "godly man" ought to behave (while doing nothing to ensure that he does so, and even less to punish him if he does not, thus making aggressive or coercive male behavior toward women virtually riskfree for men), they strenuously resist efforts to enact laws which could increase rape prosecutions or extend protections for women against sexual assault, citing concerns about - you can guess - men's rights. This is apparent in the narrowing definition of rape - and the continuing insistence by men that women lie, women falsely accuse of rape and most of all that many, if not most, rapes are not really rape at all.

The ultimate social priority for religion is to assert and enforce the patriarchal ideal of total authority of men over women, and to that end, religious conservatives - and their men in government - are willing to grant even rapists and abusers privileges over women, to safeguard the authority of "godly" men. In short, in order to protect the privilege of all men, themselves included of course, even "godly" men who profess to abhor rape willingly award rapists and abusers the right to reproduce using women's bodies against their will. As always, there is no thought spared for the humanity of the women who would be sacrificed to this Christian ideology. If they are mentioned at all, involuntarily pregnant women's physical and emotional violation is dismissed as a "blessing": a "gift from God".

Restrictive "purity" codes for girls 
- demanding that they bear the 
responsibility for men's sexual urges 
- is already a real thing in the
 conservative Christian world - 
This is shockingly similar to
  Islamic sharia dress codes.

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here.

Religious conservatives want Roe v Wade overturned because they oppose the principles of individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy for women upon which the decision was based.  That denial of those rights would relegate women to less than human status is exactly the point. Second-class status for women would be a feature, not a bug, for Christian conservatives since the Bible commands that women are not equal but subordinate to men. Bible-based religion asserts that man is the original human and woman, taken from man, is less than human. This is the reality of Bible-based governance. It seems like a nightmare from the dark ages, or some dystopian futuristic novel, but this is really happening right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Al Stefanelli's post on this subject is a must-read.  And please watch this brief, powerful video and share it with everyone you know. This is not just a possible vision of future life for women in the USA - it will be the inevitable outcome of a Bible-based US government. Women's civil rights, our freedom, our dignity and our humanity are literally on the line.

via newleftmedia

This Is My Body

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.


Share. Share. Share.

In an earlier post, I tried to explain how women in the USA are in grave danger from the religious right.

"The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception...

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here." Wait, Consent Means What?

This is not alarmist rhetoric; it is a fact.  Extreme religion induces people to behave in ways which they never would do if they were not under the pernicious influence of terrible supernatural belief.  Women themselves are complicit in their own oppression and the oppression of other women. Please wake up, American women!!!

Women Unite 4.28.12

To salute the WomenUnite rallies protesting the War on Women. 

I cannot believe that we are still fighting this battle in 2012.

Liberal Media, Godless Scientists...Murderous Doctors?

Will doctors refuse to play the "enforcer"?

I was recently thrilled to see a doctor stepping forward to call government intrusion into the private decisions of female citizens the outrage that it is. I think it bears reposting. Writing anonymously, the doctor made a case for principled medicine, and provided some tips on how doctors should practice civil disobedience in states where these ghastly laws are in effect. The essay was originally posted on the blog Whatever.  Also anonymously. I think that is disturbing.

Christian terrorism is rarely called
out by a cowed and cowardly media.

When citizens feel they can only speak out "anonymously", the chilling irony should not be lost on us - it should be ringing alarm bells. Loudly. People who still believe in the principles of equality and freedom, even if they do not agree that it might be a good idea to consult experts before writing terrible laws, ought to be worried when free speech is suppressed. People who value a free society should be horrified that there are citizens among them who are too frightened to speak openly when they disagree with the government.

Some doctors are angry about being used by the government to intimidate a subset of its citizens. They are rightly aghast at being compelled to be the brutal enforcers of this Republican governmental violation of women's most basic human dignity - doctors being forced by law to commit state-mandated rape as a method of anti-abortion rights coercion - when there is no medical reason for compulsory testing of this kind prior to an abortion. Some have begun to realize that part of the anti-abortion strategy is to undermine both their authority as medical experts and their trusted position in society. But most of these doctors remain silent.  And the very few who do speak out, tend to do so anonymously. Why?

Christian jubilation after the
murder of Dr. Tiller sends a clearly
threatening message to doctors.

One reason is pressure from within the profession. Some doctors are perfectly happy to put religious ideology over the welfare of their female patients and may privately support laws forcing their peers to bow to church authority.  Many other doctors are understandably alarmed by the violent rhetoric and physical harassment directed at pro-choice doctors by anti-choice groups, so they pressure their peers not to offer the full range of women's health services, not to speak out about the immorality of withholding appropriate medical care, not to make waves which could endanger them all. The few doctors who dare to protest unconstitutional laws based on religious ideology are intimidated into anonymity by threats to their livelihoods and reputations and even threats to their physical safety. They are presented with an ethical catch-22 situation: they know that invasive procedures - including vaginal penetration with an ultrasound wand against a patient's will and for no legitimate medical reason - goes against everything most doctors say they believe about doing no harm to a patient, but those who try to apply those ethics to women patients are threatened with prosecution if they disobey these draconian anti-woman laws.

Already wealthy, tax-exempt churches
lobbied for access to federal funds to
duplicate secular public services. The churches
can  supplement their grants with cash
from their own fat reserves and wait patiently
for the cash-strapped secular agencies
 to starve and shut down, leaving the field
clear for a total church takeover.

The intimidation of doctors is just the latest in a steady round of attacks on traditionally respected professions by an unholy alliance of religious and corporate elites and their political arm, the Republican party. Their long term strategy is to replace the current political system in the United States - democratic republicanism - with an authoritarian theocratic regime: a Bible-based government, led by godly men and answerable only to God (whose "commands" are, naturally, communicated only through those same godly men). That strategy has relied heavily on the tactic of stirring up fear, suspicion and resentment to undermine public confidence in an array of once-trusted professions while simultaneously planting and building churches around the country. The targeted groups have long been hated by religious hardliners and wealthy, powerful elites because of their relative inability to control the information coming from these sources. The goal is to replace the secular resources that serve society with church-controlled resources.

Republican candidates like
Rick Santorum vied for the title
of "most devout Christian"
to the delight of the
religious elites.

Republican strategists capitalized on the natural (but usually milder) anti-intellectualism that is common in a population that believes it can point to its own physical strength, raw ingenuity and dogged determination for the country's success as much as, if not more than, the work of highly educated, high-falutin' "experts". When tough economic times hit the middle class hard in the late 70's and again in the early 90's, those smoldering resentments were all too easily fanned into the raging flames of a culture war. Government agencies (It's not Uncle Sam, it's big brother!), scientists (godless evilutionists!), teachers (lazy, freeloading glorified babysitters!) and journalists (It's not the free press, it's the commie, liberal media!) were the first casualties of the manufactured "populist" rejection of formerly respected experts and secular representatives of peoples' interests. Political operatives worked hard to sow doubt, distrust and contempt for the essential human resources upon which a civil society relies and they have succeeded to an alarming degree. Where once a public servant's religious views were a non-issue, today virtually any candidate for public office in the USA must pass a religious test - specifically must display Christian bona fides - to have any hope of winning a nomination.

The attack on medical doctors - probably the most trusted profession in the modern era - is a part of this series of attacks on the secular foundations of American society. It is not accidental that doctors have joined scientists, teachers and journalists in the crosshairs of Republican operatives. Like scientists and journalists before them, doctors as a group were once able to work fairly independent of ideological influences. Individual doctors brought their own beliefs to their practices, of course, but the profession as a whole was not under pressure to conform to a particular politicized religious ideology.

This state of affairs could not be permitted by the Republicans or their powerful backers. Authoritarian political systems demand ideological purity and social conformity, so doctors - like journalists and scientists before them - posed a threat to the political ambitions of the Republican party, especially in terms of their strategy to use abortion as the rallying "cause" which could impassion voters enough to vote blindly against their own interests. If left unthreatened, doctors might challenge the lying propaganda that the anti-abortion movement was spreading and puncture the bubble of misguided passion the religious right had so carefully blown up. If permitted to retain their respected and trusted position in society, doctors might undermine the attempts of religious political operatives to replace trusted public resources with private Christian agendas.

Prison for doctors?

Hence the push for legislation which targets doctors as well as women. When pressed to say what penalty abortion should bring to a "guilty party" should their dream of criminalizing abortion be realized, anti-abortion leaders usually shy away from suggesting a punishment for the women involved (probably sensing that it would be a loser at the polls), but nearly all declare that, as the "butchers" who "kill babies", doctors should be thrown into prison for murder. Sensing the target on their backs, doctors have fallen silent as wave after wave of unconstitutional and medically unsound legislation has been passed, heaping untold misery upon women.

Thus, the goals of the Republican party may soon be achieved. Doctors may be rightly disrespected for standing silently by as the medical ethics they claim to believe in are violated by these laws: as women are grossly mistreated, legal medical procedures are withheld - even in potentially life-threatening situations - and patients are harmed by bad medical practices. Furthermore, doctors may be rightly distrusted by women (and many men) for many of the same reasons, in addition to the betrayal of doctor-patient trust upon which competent health care must rest.

If principled doctors fail to act to stop this looming crisis of public confidence, the consequences for society extend far beyond the impact on doctors and women. The public confidence has been successfully undermined in the media, in teachers and in scientists with predictably terrible results. Religious conservatives may claim that their holy books can provide all of the answers to the needs of humankind, but even science's most vindictive critics turn to medical science for help when a health crisis occurs or - irony of ironies! when they need assisted reproduction using technology developed through evolutionary science - while they work tirelessly to deny that opportunity to others. Should they, and other hypocrites like them, succeed in convincing enough people that doctors, like teachers and scientists, are not respectable authorities who can be trusted, then to whom will the people be able to turn when they need real assistance?

Keeping a low profile and hoping that this madness is only a temporary cultural spasm fueled by a fringe group of religious fanatics will be a mistake. It did not work for scientists, teachers or journalists.  It did not work for the people who believed such radical theocrats could never seriously win elections and form governments. It has not been working - with frightening consequences - and the situation will only get worse as long as professionals shrink back fearfully from challenging the lies and disinformation that are being deliberately disseminated to undermine public confidence in them. I am encouraged by the letter I linked to at the top of this post, but it sure would be nice to see many more doctors stand up and say "Enough is enough!".

The manipulation of public trust in doctors, scientists, teachers, the media, and even their elected representatives is a dangerous power play by the conservative right wing. Destroying trust in the resources best-equipped to provide the public with the services it needs is a strategy which has had terrible consequences for millions of people, and ultimately could tear apart the very fabric of our civil society.  That is a game that should never have been played.

Equal Pay Day

For all those who work for pay in the USA, today is Tax Day - midnight tonight is the deadline for filing income tax forms.  It also happens to be Equal Pay Day, which is pretty ironic.  Equal Pay Day marks the point in the year when the average woman has finally earned as much as the average man working at the same job had earned by December 31 last year.  Yes, the earnings gap remains that wide.

NPR touched on this subject yesterday in this interview.  It is hard to believe that a political candidate can be so utterly tone deaf, but it looks like Mitt Romney really is that out of touch with the reality of ordinary, middle-class life in the USA today.   From their privileged perch of inherited wealth, Romney and his homemaker wife, Ann, chastise women and the poor for not working harder.  The breathtaking lack of empathy or even basic human decency really does stun me some days.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin,  a state senator is giving Republican governor Scott Walker a run for his money in the race to win this weeks' Most Misogynist Medal. Sen. Glenn Grothman asserts that earning money is just more important to men.

"Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who supports Gov. Scott Walker's repeal of a law that protected workers from pay discrimination, recently said, "You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious."

Got that, ladies?

I wish this were an aberration, but this is just the latest attack in the War on Women from the Republican party. The push to strip away reproductive rights, to deny equal pay for work of equal value and to withhold support for continued authorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it might provide legal protections for LBGT victims of violence are all signs that the Republican party believes that it has drummed up enough support in the general voting population to come out openly with its nakedly bigoted and misogynist agenda.  What is really frightening is that they could be right.

Sandra Fluke wrote an excellent op ed for CNN about the importance of equal pay for work of equal value.  Try not to read the comments which follow the third year law student's well-written article. As if it wasn't bad enough that this is already tax day, equal pay day and a Tuesday*, it looks like the very worst of the bottom-feeding continent of CNN trolls made a special effort to be as despicable as possible there.  Do yourself a favor and click away as soon as you finish the article.

*Tuesday Tonics are here for a reason!

UPDATE:  The Zingularity has the latest polls gathered in one place, and the news is better than I feared. Perhaps the spin doctors hope to create a self-fulfilling prophesy by reporting that Romney's numbers are improving among women. Let's hope they are wrong!

Equal Pay, Schmequal Pay

I am up to my neck in company and cooking this weekend -  yes, that's it!  That is a great excuse for not posting! - but I had to just slip this one in here.  Daniel Finke at Camels With Hammers on FTB posted about the latest shot across the bow of the ship of equal rights. That leaky old vessel is looking worse for wear lately.

This time, it is the Wisconsin legislature, headed by the deservedly embattled Scott Walker, which has rolled back the calendar on yet another milestone in the history of women's rights.  The Wisconsin house, voting along (Republican) party lines, voted to repeal the 2009 law which tried to address unfair, unequal pay practices in the state.  Huffpost article here.

Looks like, with a possible recall looming over his head, Walker is determined to do as much damage as he possibly can to the state of Wisconsin before June.  Naturally, he also seems keen to polish his credentials with the GOP - perhaps he is planning on a federal run if the people of Wisconsin throw him out of the Governor's office - by firing off as many destructive missiles at women as he possibly can, too.

The Republican War on Women:  coming soon to a state near you.

Triggers

I have had a hard time functioning normally these past few months thanks to the cluster of shockingly misogynistic bills that have come before some state legislatures and the even more viciously misogynistic rationale, propaganda and political strategy which spawned them.  I have about a dozen posts in various stages of production,  but right now I seem to be incapable of sorting through it all calmly enough to write coherently on any one of them.

There is a term for this logjam of emotion, this mind-choking wad of confusion, rage, pain, misery and almost nihilistic despair which is triggered by events which stir up horrible memories of past trauma: post traumatic stress disorder.

I have never been diagnosed with PTSD and I probably never will be.  I doubt I will ever trust a medical professional enough to ever go for assessment. The worst traumas in my life were visited upon me by the very professions upon which society depends to protect people from criminal assaults or to treat them for medical emergencies.  Like many women, I have learned the hard, painful way that neither police nor doctors can be trusted to care about what happens to me. Worse, I have learned, as most women do, that these professionals can even do me harm in the service of the ideologies they hold: their sincerely held belief systems which render someone like me sub-human in their eyes.

Like most women in the western world - and possibly every woman in the developing world - I have endured regular, casual, culturally-approved gender-based mistreatment from my young girlhood to the present day.  Like most women, I have been sexually assaulted - not just once but several times - ranging from the clumsy grabs at breasts and crotch which are a regular occurrence on any school playground or neighborhood backyard to the intimidation of catcalls and threats from strangers in passing cars or in nightclubs, to unwanted sexual advances after a date from which I barely escaped, to a violent daytime stranger assault that left me bruised and terrorized. To the nonchalant amusement of the police, my attacker was a teenager a little younger than I was, already known to the authorities from having committed this type of assault before, and I was informed that no charges would be laid, because it might "ruin the kid's life". Had I been a man, brutally attacked and beaten at midday as he was on his way to work, the perpetrator would have been charged with aggravated assault at least. But I was a young woman, still a teenager, and the perp also sexually assaulted me. For that, the potential for his reputation to be ruined by a charge of attempted rape was considered much worse than the fact that my life would never be the same again, even after I recovered from my injuries.

Unlike most women, but probably like many more than women themselves realize, I have been denied information about a life-threatening condition in order to limit my choices in my own healthcare.  A doctor placed his religious ideology above my life and decided that I was not to be trusted with information which might have resulted in my choosing a legal abortion in order to safeguard my own health and possibly my life.  There is no doubt that my choice would have been to try to save that very much-wanted pregnancy anyway, but the knowledge that a person with power so dehumanized me that he felt he had the right - no, the god-given duty - to take away my right to make my own healthcare decisions by concealing the facts from me - even at the risk of my dying because of it - is an emotional trauma from which I may never recover.

Women in the west are constantly chastising themselves for failing to be happy in our modern, post-feminist world. Men who love us cannot understand why we can't just be happy, and we ask ourselves the same question. We wonder why, with all of our alleged equality in the modern world, we cannot seem to feel equal or respected or safe. The answer is simple: we know, through constant lived experience, that in every human culture we are not equal, not respected and never safe.

Women in the west have been force-fed a sickening glut of lies and misogyny that has, I believe, left too many of us paralyzed. Reality does not match the story our culture tells us, and we have daily proof that our rights as "equal" human beings are a myth. We are paralyzed with fear and we are paralyzed with the knowledge of just how degraded and dehumanized we remain in a world that is still overwhelmingly dominated by misogynist, religiously-fueled patriarchy. We are humiliated by the daily barrage of hateful messages directed at ourselves, our daughters, our sisters, our friends, and we are doubly humiliated because we are jeered at and intimidated into silence if we dare to try to talk about it. We try to play the game, try to figure out how to navigate the world without falling victim to the constant threats to our minds, bodies and livelihoods, and we try to suck up the inevitable attacks every female human being endures in her life - simply because she is female - to keep on living as joyfully as we can.

I have lived the life of a relatively-privileged and protected white woman in the western world:  raised in a society which pays lip service to equality for all human beings, but which systematically privileges a few dominant groups. Like all average western women, I have endured a lifetime of fear of assault, shame for the fact of my femaleness, humiliation at the hands of men, betrayal by men and by other women (who have joined the patriarchy in beating other women down to save themselves further pain) and doctor-mandated rape as punishment for having the audacity to seek medical care to which I was legally entitled.

"Many women find Pap smears embarrassing, 
and they would avoid getting them if they could get away with it 
and still get the other gynecological care they need...Is it paternalistic to require a Pap smear in order to get contraceptive pills? One could argue that. But it's also effective. Sometimes doctor really does know best."

Elizabeth Boskey, PhD*

The recent rash of horrors from state legislatures mandating - among other horrors - state-sponsored rape of women seeking abortions is nothing more than the logical extension of a 50-year policy of subjugating women to doctor-mandated rape for seeking female controlled birth control.  The rationale that women need "information" forced upon them before choosing a legal abortion to end an unplanned or forced pregnancy is no more dishonest than the rationale that forced "screening for cervical cancer" is a necessary prerequisite before oral contraceptives can be safely prescribed. Both rationales come from the same root belief: a woman seeking birth control/abortion is a slut who deserves to be punished for having sex. Both rationales are lies. 

Many women have been following recent events with growing terror, and that is the longterm goal of this strategy:  to keep women in a perpetual state of fear so that we will not dare to organize again and speak out to defend our human rights.  We are publicly worried about losing what few rights we had managed to win in the last century,  and we are privately frightened every day by the intimidation of a patriarchal society which threatens to strip a woman of everything she cherishes - the love of her family and friends, her ability to earn a living, her very life - unless she conforms to its impossible norms and restrictions.

Most women keep trying to play the game. Most women hope that if they try hard enough to please, try hard enough not to be too pushy, try hard enough not to be too demanding or too insistent on being treated as the equal of men, then somehow they will avoid attack. They play along to get along.

United, we can stand up to misogyny.

But, here is the thing, my sisters:

Playing along to get along isn't working.

It has never worked.


It is time to be courageous and stand up.

It is time to do what is right and speak out.

We can face down the fear together.




It may take me a while to be able to finish that dozen or so posts.  But, I will get there.  I hope you will be there with me.

* In November, 2010, Dr. Boskey added the following postscript to her unedited original post on Ask.com. :

Update 11/10: Since writing this article, I've read many women's stories of their experiences getting Pap smears, and I'm no longer in favor of using birth control pills as a way to encourage Pap screening. I still think that regular, although not yearly, screening is important; however, I think that it would be better to recruit women through education than through mechanisms that are perceived as highly coercive. Your stories have changed my mind. Thank you.

While this postscript is called an "update", it sits at the bottom of the page well after the article is concluded. The original article has not been updated: the language and message remains unchanged from the original including the quotes above.