Violence Against Women

May 2, 2003 5:14 AM

Violence against womenis one issue where the current administration aligns itself with the "axis of evil" and "known terrorist supporting countries." I suppose they might feel it's oo bad the Taliban doesn't still rule Afghanistan so they could have one more ally.

"For too long, the feminists have been pushing a radical, special-interest agenda under the erroneous mantra made rhetorical cliche by Hillary Clinton: 'Women's rights are human rights,'" writes Janice Crouse, an official of the conservative group Concerned Women for America and a member of the U.S. delegation. ...
The alliance isn't new - it took root when the Bush administration took over. But it is often unseen. The United States has frequently sided at the UN with countries such as Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Iraq - when it was still controlled by Saddam Hussein - in battles over language involving women and children's rights.
posted by nofundy (15 comments total)

shrub and cheney certainly seem to keep their spouses muzzled.
posted by quonsar at 5:23 AM on May 2, 2003

Baa... The GOP don't need no stinkin' women! The male lifestyle nazis will always get them the votes they need.
posted by EmoChild at 5:38 AM on May 2, 2003

All this news is long overdue. The media seemed to impose a self filter of criticism during the war, and after 9/11, but the honeymoon is over.

There is a lot of crap the current administration shoveled through under our noses, and the media has a lot of catching up to do.

I can't think of a better term of what is about to come then "Shit Storm".
posted by CrazyJub at 6:14 AM on May 2, 2003

I don't know how prevalent the attitude is, but where I work the more fundamentalist people do consider women more or less chattel. One of the first conversations I had with somebody was after they chided me for being a communist because I am Canadian. They also brought up the stricter Canadian gun laws and I pointed out that while I'm not necessarily in favour of them I had to admit that the murder rate in this little US town of 12000 people surpassed that of my much larger Canadian hometown of 230000 people. His response was "yeah, but our murder rate probably also includes domestic disputes too."

I tried to question him on what exactly he meant but he pretty much shut up after that. I'm left with the impression that blowing your wife's brains out isn't murder, it's tough love in his opinion. Maybe he meant that the Canadian statistics didn't include cases of domestic abuse but it seems to me that that would be a pretty glaring omission from statistics. I did some free work for somebody at his church and was sent a bunch of links to stuff "I should read" on their churches homepage. A lot of it was very paternistic but not abusive. Women are weaker, they need a man to lead them down the path of righteousness. It's wrong before God for a women to have dominion over a man and other stuff.

The basis of this all seems to be the old testament and Eve getting mankind kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Apparently this isn't an allegory and they haven't forgiven women for this yet.

Again, this is an anecdote based on a very small sample size though I'd assume that at least the women as an inferior and less righteous class is at least prevalent enough that their church doesn't'[ disintegrate by publicizing these views.
posted by substrate at 6:19 AM on May 2, 2003

You're Canadian? Damn red bastards always trying to take our jobs and our women! Seriously though, I really think that these antifeminist, fundamentalist groups are so far out of touch with reality of other people's lives that there is no bringing them back. They can only see things in terms of their own way of life and the set tenets that they operate under (the fundamentals). How is white suburban, wealthy lifestyle supposed to translate to the very harsh realities of the inner city or the back woods (although there you get a whole new set of fundamentals) or to famine, war and AIDS infested Africa? Its one thing to be Lynn Cheney in Bethesda or Westchester or Evanston, but that 1950's bullshit don't fly in Anacostia or Harlem or South Side or Malawi for that matter.
posted by Pollomacho at 7:47 AM on May 2, 2003

shrub and cheney certainly seem to keep their spouses muzzled.
posted by quonsar at 5:23 AM PST on May 2

"Speaking about first ladies, you drew the short straw. See, if Graham and Sanford were smart, they'd have asked First Lady Laura Bush to come instead of me. (Applause.) But I -- he said he did. (Laughter.) The reason she couldn't come, well, it rained in Crawford. (Laughter.) And that's where she is, and she's sweeping the porch because the President of China is coming tomorrow. (Laughter.)"
-President Bush, 0ctober 24, 2002

posted by the fire you left me at 7:51 AM on May 2, 2003

See, THIS is the fantasy world I'm talking about!
posted by Pollomacho at 8:33 AM on May 2, 2003

In baseball your, out, on two strikes..

Yet she was hit at the husbands work, so he would have been fires at my work too.
posted by thomcatspike at 8:49 AM on May 2, 2003

I suppose they might feel it's [t]oo bad the Taliban doesn't still rule Afghanistan so they could have one more ally.

Yes, I'm sure that's precisely how the administration feels.
posted by Ty Webb at 8:56 AM on May 2, 2003

...been fires at my work too.
...been fired...been like a fire too.
posted by thomcatspike at 8:59 AM on May 2, 2003

You know, feminists tried to raise awareness about the Taliban for years. No one listened, until finally the Bush administration had a pragmatic reason for catching on and lectured us about the evils of gender apartheid.

The nonfeminist left, which I've started to think is a sizable part of the left, suspected then and suspects now that there's something vaguely anti-Islamic and imperialist about opposing the Taliban, that their treatment of women is part of the culture.

So even with bizarre objections to a phrase like "forced pregnancy," in a document that otherwise condemns rape, I think we're sometimes better off with the cynical pragmatists. It should also be mentioned that Dan Burton, a pugnacious Indiana Republican, has been the main force in fighting to get American women kidnapped by their Saudi fathers back into the U.S. (he's been backed by a number of Democrats.)
posted by transona5 at 12:29 PM on May 2, 2003

Transona5: even with bizarre objections to a phrase like "forced pregnancy," in a document that otherwise condemns rape,

Sadly, the reality is not so bizarre. From the the UN commission report:

" Many reports states that perpetrators said they were ordered to rape, or that the aim was to ensure that the victims and their families would never return to the area.

Perpetrators tell female victims that they will bear children of the perpetrator's ethnicity, that they must become pregnant, and then hold them in custody until it is too late for the victims to get an abortion. Victims are threatened that if they ever tell anyone, or anyone discovers what has happened, the perpetrators will hunt them down and kill them..."
posted by echolalia67 at 1:39 PM on May 2, 2003

Oh, I don't think the language itself is bizarre - just the U.S. delegation's objections. I'm well aware that forced pregnancy is a reality, and it's baffling that anyone could oppose condemning it.
posted by transona5 at 1:45 PM on May 2, 2003

My guess is that they were opposing some use of the words "forced pregnancy" (which could, if you think about it, include living in a country which has outlawed abortion), as opposed to the much more graphic and precise term 'rape.' It's like calling a murder an assissted death; it can be interpreted as an attempt to dilute the language, and thereby dilute people's perceptions of the severity of the crime.

Somewhere along the line, someone realized that language plays a very big role in the politics of oppression. Words like 'cute,' while descriptive, are also dismissive, for example. Likewise, we have words to dismiss the intelligence of lowerclass whites (redneck, hillbilly). This understanding is what has led to the linguistic front in feminism.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:20 AM on May 3, 2003

When right-wing zealots got $34 million cut from global family-planning funds, two women vowed to raise money from their friends to replace it. A million dollars later, they're just getting started.
posted by homunculus at 1:31 PM on May 4, 2003