A famous woman just wrote a book about her unique, historic achievement and its denouement. The book’s publication triggered dismissive demands from some people (but #NotAllMen) that exemplify the EverydaySexism of women’s lives. Her book is History. Telling women to “settle down and not divide the party” is demeaningly sexist and tediously common whether the topic is one woman’s right to tell her historic story or all women’s rights to equal pay, equal opportunity, and self-determination. Those who say “settle down and don’t divide the party” are being divisive themselves.
Women are encouraged to change the patriarchy by running for office and training for STEM careers. Yet women in government, academia, science, and tech are patronized, ignored, and abused. The sexist control begins in childhood — at school and in our homes. Domination of our thoughts, our bodies, and our freedoms permeates our lives.
This week, amidst misogyny (“she needs to go away”) and assumptions of innocence (I’m a Progressive! My mother was a feminist! I have daughters!), I’ve read wonderful comments from women. They outline the reality behind “women should” dictates, including those posted by Daily Kos members.
Note that many of these comments arose in response to a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s book “What Happened” but the points made transcend one candidate and one woman. They represent EveryWoman.
Officebss
These calls for UNITY while downgrading women’s reproductive rights to an “optional issue” remind me of the fights for and over the 14th Amendment, which gave black men who were former slaves the franchise, but denied it to all women, including black women who were former slaves. The Abolitionist movement was very much indebted to women, but when it came time to push for the 14th Amendment, the men betrayed all their sisters.
i saw an old tree today
It’s framing the voice of women, which was an issue in this election, every election to date, and continues to be. It’s not about the primary, nor even the general, it’s about women’s voices, overcoming attempts to silence, and continuing to talk about how women perceive control though dismissal, being talked-over and demeaned, frankly. This past election is the glaring example.
YellowDogInGA
It’s amazing how many people are so totally deaf to the fact that millions of women are getting past grief and moving into enraged.
Onomastic
The men who went after Planned Parenthood when they endorsed Hillary, the men who went after Hillary supporters and drove them underground, the males in the Punditry class who flew their sexism flag high with their odious double standard and focus on “optics,” the men who want Hillary to shut up and go away now, are the ones who have been pitting men against women.
We know damn well that what they’re saying to her, they’re saying to all of us.
“Shut up and sit down.”
We’ve know it for a very long time.
allergywoman
I think it’s naive to think a person can grow up in a racist, sexist society and not be affected by it. I’m not saying everyone in the United States is a racist or sexist, just that it will affect you. How? Shutting you off from others’ perspectives, for one. Major media is biased toward white men. You can find voices of color and women, but it’s harder and you have to make the effort. I don’t know how we counter it entirely, either, but I think recognizing it is the first step and it’s hard enough. I still get people who think they aren’t affected by our society. I don’t know what to say to them.
I thought I knew what to say to “them” — those who don’t recognize their entitlement in being the default setting, the normal against which everything else is measure, the ones generally in charge of all the gates. As part of a longer comment explaining why “not all men” is an invalid defense, I wrote the following.
...the point is that language generalizations are part of common speech and by taking exception when you feel personally included by virtue of being in the general class (and that general class is of the Dominator Class) you are derailing and demeaning what the victims of the Dominators are trying to say (and teach you).
This didn’t go over well with the people (men in this case) determined to exclude themselves from generalized language. They were more concerned they’d been falsely included than they were to deal with the reality that a generalization exists because of the universal woman’s experience. Some were more concerned with their hurt feelings. Too often these same hurt feelings guys are the ones telling women to not push for equal pay, reproductive freedom, and other basic rights because there are bigger issues and we need to be united. They demand unity and ignore parity.
Do you think we women will be fully on “the team” if our rights are less valued than yours? If a team requires women to be silent, to give way on issues of essential importance to our lives, then the problem is your team.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who need to hear this message are not reading a story titled War on Women.
What this requires of people who are reading this, especially if you are male, includes these responsibilities.
- Speak up.
- Truly be feminist allies by not letting other men get away with sexist language and actions.
- Point out sexism when you see it.
- Be willing to examine yourself if personally accused of sexism.
- Don’t auto-shift into self-defense and justification.
- Don’t shut down women and make their complaints secondary to your feelings about being accused or your opinion about what we “should do.”
Refusing to recognize your own sexism is sexist. Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse explained this in her excellent story for SpiritSisters.
The sexist control begins in childhood
...on the whole, girls are getting more miserable while boys are not. The annual Children’s Society Report confirms this. It is an intelligent, multifaceted report that understands how disadvantage itself is complex.
There are all sorts of conclusions to be drawn from it, but I am interested in this gender gap in misery that has been widening and has not changed since last year . . . I see this manifest misery of some young girls as a direct result of the backlash against even rudimentary feminism.
“Men are learning to have false ideas about masculinity, and women are also learning to be submissive. It is happening in the same household, Pandey said. “Everyone’s out to make it look like there’s something inherently wrong with [rapists]. But they are a part of our own society. They are not aliens who’ve been brought in from another world.” […]
Griffith pleaded guilty to felony sexual assault earlier this year for having sex with a 13-year-old who was a patient at a teenage addiction recovery center where Griffith was an employee. A second girl at the facility also alleged that Griffith had raped her, although those charges were dropped as part of Griffith’s guilty plea.
Domination of our thoughts, our bodies, and our freedoms
- This first tweet was in response to an Irish radio host partly blaming a woman for being raped. As of the time (Wednesday) I embedded this tweet it had 28,549 retweets in three days.
- Bicycling to defy the patriarchy. “I’m standing against something bigger than I originally thought. When I advocate for women’s cycling, I’m advocating for women’s independence.”
Saudi Arabia remains one of the world’s most repressive countries for women, where a man’s consent is obligatory for women to access human rights, and feminist activists risk arrest. Some changes are creeping in: King Salman has loosened the grip of male guardianship, and is encouraging women to work. But they are still not allowed to drive.
There are, however, women who refuse to be still. Twenty-five-year-old Baraah Luhaid has always loved cycling. But although women’s cycling was legalised in 2013, it is only allowed in parks or on beaches, and only with a male guardian present. Luhaid is striving to get women – and the fight for women’s rights – moving.
A man killed 7 people last night and was killed by a cop in Plano, Texas - at a Dallas Cowboy football game watch party hosted by a woman who recently filed for divorce from her husband, the man with the gun. Her death wasn’t uncommon — FBI data shows that 54.9 percent of mass shootings between 2009 to 2016 include victims who are the woman’s current or former partner or family member.
It isn’t a coincidence that Hight died after she left her husband. The worst violence occurs when the abuser has lost control of the victim. Women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the two weeks after leaving their abuser than when they are still in the relationship.
Remember 7 out of 10 women who die from domestic violence are killed while leaving or within 2 weeks after they left.
- A Cleveland cop sexually assaulted women and his plea deal allowed a kidnapping charge to be dropped. After an internal investigation, he was fired, can no longer be a police officer, and has to register as a sex offender. (That’s not good enough and adds to the bad rep Cleveland has for handling crimes committed by cops.)
- A Red Dystopia: "Any dystopia that I try to imagine to write about as part of a science fiction future draws from a documented history of the abuse of women in nearly every culture." Here are a two examples.
The fictional diagnosis of “post-abortion syndrome” claimed to be as severe as PTSD from war. Our tax money pays for programs in South Dakota and Iowa promoting this “syndrome” as a kind of shell-shock affecting 40 to 60 percent of “aborted women” (i.e., women who’ve had abortions). The Iowa website asserts that abortion deprives women of sexual pleasure and causes “loss of pleasure from intercourse, increased pain, an aversion to sex and/or males in general or the development of a promiscuous life-style.”
Black women brought as slaves to the U.S. for forced labor were raped by white men from the plantation. Their children were born enslaved and sold at will to profit the plantation owners.
Women in government, academia, science, and tech are patronized, ignored, and abused
- Do the women get to talk around here (here = White House dinner with Congressional members)
...the lawsuit is accusing the company of maintaining a “policy, pattern, and practice” of “sex discrimination against female employees” which has led to lower pay and job equality across the board. They’re asking for a jury trial.
- It’s not prejudice just a perception.
- Women’s Voice Remain Faint in Politics. In New York City <25% of city council members are women. In Los Angeles, they account for 2 of 15 councilors; in Chicago, 13 of 50; in Houston, 4 of 16; and in Philadelphia, 6 of 17.
And they’re no better off in most American legislative bodies . . . That the very nature of a legislature can be shaped by gender balance is self-evident. This is true on a broad range of issues, but conspicuously so on matters like child care, maternity leave and preventive cancer screenings. At the federal level, how could heads not shake in May when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, formed his working group on health care? He initially thought it was fine to go with 13 men and no women.
“Women legislators bring with them lived experiences and crucial viewpoints that allow them to identify and take on the unique challenges that women face,” the New York women’s caucus aptly said.
Women’s light presence in government is not a case of their faring worse than men at the ballot box. The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, a research group at the City University of New York, found that the sexes win or lose elections nationwide at about the same rates. The issue, the institute said in a report last September, is that women tend not to run for office in the first place.
Women are getting past grief
and moving into enraged and empowered
Demand Betsy DeVos protect Title IX for sexual assault survivors
Tell Congress: Pass the Military Justice Improvement Act
Tell CA Gov Jerry Brown to sign the Sexual Assault Survivors Bill of Rights
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN PROVIDES A WEEKLY SUMMARY OF NEWs ON WOMEN'S ISSUES AND INFORMATION ON CURRENT POLITICAL ACTIONS. WE WELCOME ALL WHO ARE INTERESTED TO JOIN, TO WRITE FOR US, AND TO PROVIDE RELEVANT LINKS AND STORIES.
Thanks to sandrallap, ramara, tara, elenacarlena, and eyesbright for their help gathering this week’s news.
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Do you know this woman’s story?
Find her at WOW2 — Part A www.dailykos.com/...