What triggers women to rampage violently and hold strangers responsible for our problems? (Low wages? Voting rights? Autonomy over our bodies? Professional opportunities? How our boyfriends dress?) Whose approval of our interests and desires do we need? What if the world were shaped by how we pursue our pleasures?
Society’s gatekeepers decide who is worthy, what actions are notable, which issues deserve our attention. By responding to them with respect and appreciation, we give gatekeepers the power to define priorities, establish hierarchies, and even absolve us of our failures. People who see themselves as part of the patriarchy (regardless of gender) take for granted their right to make these authoritative decisions and to receive the benefits that fall to them naturally. A protection program operating within the patriarchy moves to quickly shield members who have lost authority or been called out for misbehavior.
We see this internal safeguard spring into action for major events such as #MeToo as the accused men are given a public platform to reclaim their professional status or are welcomed back into the spotlight. It’s easier for famous men to return to their power positions, but as we’ve seen repeatedly many men get away with their assaults on women because society’s gatekeepers blame the victim. Junot Diaz may have attempted to pre-justify his sexual harassment of women by outing himself as a childhood rape victim. He already has supporters lined up decrying trial by Twitter. He is both sympathetic abuse victim and sexist abuser.
Obviously there is a place for repentance, for learning to be better than your past behaviors. Twitter and other media are not the same as a guilty verdict in court. Sometimes people (yes, women too) make false accusations to further their own private vendettas. When women protect each other, however, the patriarchal media asks “Has MeToo jumped the shark?” But society protects the patriarchy to keep women subjugated.
- A man shoots his girlfriend because he doesn’t like how she’s dressed.
- Men justify murder as a suitable protest for women not choosing to have sex with them.
- A male gynecologist at USC’s student health center has a long history of sexual abuse of women patients that the university failed to address despite accusations, some by nurses designated to chaperon the student patients. He finally resigns but says the nurses falsely accused him because they were jealous of young students with tight vaginas. (Never underestimate the revenge of aging vaginas.)
- In Texas, dozens of girls are still in a care facility even after allegations of sexual abuse surface. Yeah yeah, investigations are on-going and arrests likely, but there are no plans to move the girls. The man in charge of CPS thinks the girls are safe.
- A study in the UK found that “the system” allows men to rape with near impunity. “A person who is raped has between a 1.1 and 1.8 per cent prospect of seeing their rapist convicted.”
- The accusations against NY AG Eric Schneiderman highlight that choking women for pleasure is viewed as sex play. “A recent meta-analysis of 22 studies between 1978 and 2014 from seven different countries concluded that pornography consumption is associated with an increased likelihood of committing acts of verbal or physical sexual aggression, regardless of age.”
Women are not shown as news-makers and discoverers as often as we make news and discoveries.
We have been marginalized from history. Men rewrote The Odyssey to add misogyny.
And in some states, women are absent from government.
But when something goes wrong, we are held responsible.
All these examples — and worse — scatter through society as if separate unrelated events but they are underpinned by misogyny. Until we have a definitive system for tracking femicide data, we won’t have a system of preventing gender-based violent misogyny.
... one in three women globally will experience physical, sexual or psychological violence during their lifetimes, most often at the hands of a partner; such partner violence is the biggest risk factor for femicide. Of the 93,000 women killed in 2012, nearly half (47 percent) were killed by their partners.
How amazing that women are not rampaging on Wall Street, blowing up corporate offices, stabbing their shift manager at McDonalds and hiding his body in a dumpster. Millions of women have lived lives of inequality and abuse without forming homicidal tribes that ravage society. In Patriarchy Deflated, Barbara Ehrenreich asks “...what a world shaped by the female pursuit of pleasure might look like. Would it be gentle and rainbow colored? Or would it pulse with its own kinds of ecstasy and transgression?”
Women are human and as the last presidential election shows, women (white women) are fully capable of making a decision that hurts other women, society, and nature. Throughout history, women have displayed the variety of human behaviors. We are no angels.
Some of us have been bad ass.
But despite our bad assery, we haven’t formed a violent inund group, the Involuntarily Underpaid.
“The inund movement has been around as long as women have been receiving fewer – if any – wages for the same job as their male counterparts . . . So, forever.
“And in all those millennia of not receiving ample compensation for a given task – something that is in fact owed to people; unlike sex, for example – we have driven into exactly zero crowds of innocent strangers; and resorted to wholesale, blind violence precisely not a single time.”
Instead of violent killing sprees, some women are subtly denying authoritative men the right to judge us, to grant approval and absolution. Slate reports on The End of Male Approval in Comedy.
As Letterman attempts to bestow forgiveness on Fey, people in the live audience can be heard clapping. But Fey is not having it. “Thank you kindly,” she says firmly. “Here’s what was wrong with it.”
What Fey is responding to, perhaps more acutely than the audience, is the second function powering Letterman’s remark: Letterman isn’t just presenting his approval of her sketch in the spirit of comedic bonhomie. As one of comedy’s high priests, he’s doing so from a position of superiority. He clearly expects Fey to be moved by his support, but he also seems to believe his opinion carries real authority, and he expects her to consider his approval definitive. She does not.
What would a world shaped by the female pursuit of pleasure look like? A sexy male striptease show like Chippendales? A feminist utopia like Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Pleasure includes our desire for professional positions, so this female-shaped world would allow Congressional candidates to use campaign funds for childcare. We could bring our babies to the Senate floor. Dear Goddess, we could be unmarried, pregnant, and Prime Minister of New Zealand! We would have maternity leave. And we could choose to be married or unmarried and childless without recrimination. Women screenwriters, directors, and actors will seize the superhero storylines and give us Goddesses of the galaxy. Middle-aged women in the media will stop being invisible. An 80 year old woman could be erotic-seeking without being ridiculed.
In our female-shaped world, women wouldn’t be exhausted by our responsibility for staying safe, smiling, speaking up, pushing back, not being triggered by, explaining why, and every other damn thing the patriarchy demands of us over and over. Of course a female-shaped world would be nasty at times, thoughtless, rude. We aren’t angels.
Here’s what wouldn’t be part of this world, though. We’d not be driving vans into crowds because some dude wouldn’t have sex with us. If women were designed to rampage in response to denial, adversity, and marginalization, we’d have been rampaging for the past 6,000 years.
A world shaped by the female pursuit of pleasure would include transgressions.
But oh how it would pulse with our own kinds of ecstasy!
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN PROVIDES A WEEKLY SUMMARY OF NEWS ON WOMEN'S ISSUES AND INFORMATION ON CURRENT POLITICAL ACTIONS.
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