By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits , Eyes of a Monster, and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie
The assault on women’s health is not about cost, or religious freedom, or morality. It’s all about getting the women, no matter the cost — and the majority of men are OK with that. Silence is consent. So is indifference.
Men like Pennsylvania’s governor Tom Corbett who says that women should lie back and “just close their eyes” while being medically raped with mandatory ultrasounds as punishment for getting a legal medical procedure to end an unwanted medical condition, and the rest of the he-man woman-hating lawmakers’ brigade pushing these hate crimes masquerading as laws that amount to gender apartheid against women did not get voted into office by some fairy godmother.
And their supporters are no different than Ted Bundy or Gary Leon Ridgeway in their pathological hatred for women.
Sadly, most average, working class American men are really out to get women, too — they think there’s something in it for them. They identify with those who share skin color and gender and religion, even though they really won’t get a seat at the table in Alpha Dipshit Land either.
They think if they “get the women”, they will have a shot at the wealth and power the rich white guys have, and be able to uplift their miserable asses from white male working class “hell” — they’ll get ALL the good jobs and ensure their own seat in a hierarchy of unearned privileges while it’s to hell with us women who are nothing but “leeches on society.”
They think that by getting the women with “men’s rights” groups (and the misguided feminists supporting them), paying child support won’t be an issue because they can just grab custody of the babies they force women to bear, while paying NOTHING for their “recreational” sex. And forget about welfare — us women are just “leeches” for getting “their” tax dollars or their child support (which impinges on their “fun” money) for “doing nothing” while they “work hard” (yeah, because they’ve made sure WE got deprived of any chances, any human rights, any jobs, and any liberty never mind any happiness).
And they think that we’re the enemy solely because we’re women: we should be happy to starve and go without while we’re forced to bear their progeny with no other options in life whether we want to go through pregnancy and childbirth or not. We should smile sweetly and behave demurely while they make us beggars and doormats in our own country, die by age 40 from pregnancy/childbirth, and have no healthcare, no food, no decent housing, no liberty, no human rights, no jobs (how dare we expect the same opportunities and rights men are entitled to, after all!), and no alimony or child support. The idea that we deserve respect, human rights and basic personal dignity makes us “feminazis” and “man-haters.”
States like Alabama are already pulling out of TANF. So, what welfare for destitute, vulnerable pregnant women do you think will be paid out to all those forced births due to no access to contraception and abortion? What welfare for the children? The majority of men don’t care. This is ALL about “let’s get the women” — “how DARE these seductresses tempt us and then reject us, how dare they have sexual freedom, and how dare they get MY money just for having my baby when they should have kept their slutty legs closed.” If this is chivalry, you can shove it up your ass; I’d rather have justice.
After the high profile disappearance and murder of 8 months pregnant Laci Rocha Peterson on Christmas Eve in 2002 by her fertilizer salesman husband Scott Peterson — who was leading a double life and cheating on her with a series of unwitting dupes including his thin, blonde mistress (Amber Frey) — former president George W. Bush signed the Laci and Connor Law which ostensibly was to protect vulnerable pregnant women from abuse and murder by their partners and co-conceivers. Instead of protecting society’s most vulnerable women (pregnant ones), these laws are being specifically used to deliberately hurt women.
Fetal homicide laws cropped up in nearly every state. But in over 300 cases involving miscarriage, stillbirth as a result of harm against pregnant women, only one or two men were charged with two counts of murder under these laws. Meanwhile, several hundred women who suffered miscarriages or stillbirths were subjected to discriminatory legal and judicial abuse as they were charged and convicted of “feticide.” The latest known of these casualties (which are not being reported in our mainstream media and are only being covered by foreign news correspondents) in these anti-woman ideological “culture wars” was 15 yr old Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi who was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in July 2011 for the “crime” of having a stillbirth. Nobody cared whether or not the sex or the resultant pregnancy was consensual. The co-conceiver skated into oblivion, scot-free of any consequences for his actions in impregnating an underage girl without her consent — and thus committing assault through forced gestation against her will in a state with no abortion provider and no access to reliable contraception for vulnerable women on the receiving end of men’s orgasms.
As an aside, when Scott Peterson was finally apprehended and arrested for murdering his heavily pregnant wife and dumping her body in the bay, he was in possession of $15,000 in cash, four cell phones, a shitload of Viagra, and Mapquest directions to Amber Frey’s workplace. Evidence later produced in court showed that Scott Peterson didn’t want to become a father and that he added two pornographic channels to his cable TV service only a few days after Laci’s disappearance and murder.
Scott Peterson, like many other men who murder their pregnant partners, murdered Laci because she was pregnant and he wanted to be free to have sex with other women without any consequences. He admittedly resented the financial strain that Laci’s pregnancy was putting on his “lifestyle” of recreational sex as a playboy and con artist who peddled more bullshit to get in between women’s legs than the fertilizer company he worked for. On December 14th 2002, ten days before his wife’s disappearance and murder, Scott Peterson attended a Christmas party with Amber Frey after which he had sex with her without using any protection. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife went to a friend’s Christmas party alone because Scott “had to work.”
When Laci’s disappearance splashed across the major news stations, her “devoted” widower played the heartsick spouse and expectant father. His shambolic performance could have won him an Oscar. What Scott Peterson had not told his mistress, a struggling single mother whose 20 month old daughter he doted on, was that he was already married and that his wife was due to have his son Connor any day. He did tell Amber, however, that he didn’t want kids of his own, and that her child would be enough for them as he talked of their wonderful future together. He discussed getting a vasectomy at great length with his mistress. Too bad he didn’t do that before he married Laci Rocha while having a string of affairs behind her back while keeping his marriage a secret from all of his other bed victims.
Most men are really delusional narcissists who think that women control them when in their warped minds they feel they have a divine right to control us; that we are oppressing men because they get horny and their brains go to shit at the very sight of a pretty woman — and that’s all our fault, too for “making men desire us.” They cannot make sense of that desire when they’re taught to hate us by every cultural more, every inch of our society’s social fabric that was founded on genocide and on a framework of hatred laced with biblical notions centered on gender inferiority, holding all women daring to challenge patriarchy and misogyny as evil.
They really think that their existence as men is meaningless if they can’t beat us, rape us, force us to get pregnant against our will, torture and murder us to keep our uppity asses in line, and that they will lose their manhood if women have the same human rights as they do because then they cannot get away with dominating, abusing, exploiting and controlling us. And they think that we women will in turn be lost forever without men as considerate partners instead of as tyrannical “masters” and “lords” because we’re violating the natural order of things if we have human rights to our own bodies (our bodies and lives “belong” to men as cheap, disposable possessions, don’t ya know?).
Several out-of-the-closet misogynists — Steven Patterson (a rabid woman-hater from America’s heartland married to a Philippine woman), Richie Roberts, John Latta (Sales manager at OC Nissan in Irvine, CA), Leland Williams, Jr. (a wealthy Christian author and speaker), Richard Mork (a conservative Mormon from Sacramento, CA), and Jeff Morris, a wealthy executive at Brenau who lives in Greensboro, NC whose profile picture shows him standing next to his Mercedes Benz in front of his McMansion (yeah, he’s really oppressed) —signed into USA Today with their Facebook accounts to post venomous anti-woman vitriol.
They were posting anti-woman hate speech under the article on Hillary Clinton speaking out about the oppression of women by extremists across the world. And they all actually said all that shit verbatim about women controlling men, women as evil temptresses, and women getting everything at poor little oppressed men’s expense — which justifies depriving women of our human rights. Yeah, because fighting for our basic human rights makes us “feminazis” — which is just like Hitler invading the East Bloc, right?
Only one or two men gave a tepid response in calling out these men’s misogyny, and the few women posting were cyberbullied and run off the site by all the anti-woman bigots. What does that say about how men really feel about their wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, nieces and sisters? What does that say about how cruel men really are, and how much they hate women while having the moxy to call their victims of oppression “man-haters?” Men have been showing us who they really are all along. Hello, wake up ladies!
For over three decades, Rush Limbaugh spewed misogyny and vitriolic hate speech (calling women “feminazis” and “welfare queens” and other choice pejoratives) over public airwaves. Nobody complained except a tiny handful of women — most women feared being called a “feminist” because that’s a bad thing in “free country” AmeriKKKa.
In the voice of “righteousness” Pat Robertson said, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Even on progressive sites like Alternet, women cannot tell it like it really is without several “progressive” males jumping in to say, “that’s not fair, poor men this and poor men that”, trivializing and invalidating the real physical and psychological harm and oppression women are suffering. Everything is always all about the men, and never about the women — even among most Leftist men with a few very rare exceptions.
That male college professors are teaching Women’s Studies courses in colleges while paying far more attention and giving much more sympathy and activism support to the rights of misogynistic Muslim men in the Middle East than they do to the real deprivation of women’s human rights here and abroad says it all. Hezbollah and the Taliban have far more sympathizers and supporters in the human rights community than women and girls do.
War is immoral, except when it’s waged by men against women to preserve unearned male privilege with the deliberate intent to use sex and unwanted pregnancy to crush our spirits, our hopes and our dreams and destroy our bodies and cost us our lives by voting for misogynistic lawmakers committed to using fetuses instead of fists to injure, maim, or even kill women.
AmeriKKKa deserves the Scott Peterson Award for misogyny, and men who trivialize or minimize the deprivation of women’s human rights to have a say in what happens to our bodies are NOT women’s allies or friends. The only difference between America’s homegrown misogynists and the Taliban is 8,000 miles.
So why should women continue to sleep with the enemy, or vote for the enemy, support the “social justice” movements that will only benefit the enemy as they tell us that our human rights are so much less important than the “big picture”, or do business with the enemy to further enrich those who hate us, and hate our daughters?
The vast majority of men feel on a very visceral level that they have a divine right to subjugate, abuse, dominate, oppress, control, harm, maim, torture, socially and economically discard us, and even KILL us — by any means necessary.
You see, it’s our death-dealing vaginas to blame for their lost shot at immortality. This is what their religious doctrines say. Even the more enlightened and secular “progressive” men benefit from the unearned male privilege that their conservative brethren maintain through oppressing women. And they know it.
When the Occupy movement started, stories of rapes and sexual assaults at various camps leaked out. One survivor wrote in her Daily Kos diary of what she witnessed. The “facilitators” actually pressured the women who were raped into not going to the police, and “counseled” them to keep quiet about what happened — for the “greater good” of the movement and the need to keep “divisive, special interest” issues out of the discussion on social justice. Economic, social, civil and human rights for only half the population at the expense of the other half is no justice at all.
Few, if any, male social justice activists and journalists with access to the microphone and the media like Cenk Uygur, host and co-founder of the Internet and talk radio show Young Turks, and Christopher Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author of Death of the Liberal Class, have spoken out in defense of women’s human rights, other than to give some brief lip service but that’s about it. Women’s human rights have always been back-benched in every social justice movement in this country.
From Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers who said the only position for black women in the movement was “on their backs”, to the male leadership of Native American rights groups who climbed to fame and fortune while Indigenous women suffer in Third World poverty, and suffer the highest rates of murder and domestic violence, rape and unwanted pregnancies without any remedy at peril to their health and lives; to the white working class self-styled “socialists” and Leftists that blame everything on capitalism instead of on the cruel system of unearned male privilege as they deny misogyny, deny that there’s a War on Women, and trivialize the real harm to women as a result of being deprived of our basic human rights in a country by a male-dominated government that decided a 15 second old zygote and a religious corporation are “persons” but women are not.
Christopher Hedges, who chained himself to the White House fence in a publicized protest and act of civil disobedience over the war in Iraq and who spoke out about the fascist Christian Right, is noticeably silent in the face of injustice where women are the primary intended target of torture and suffering.
The one or two who timidly spoke out did so only about a quarter as vociferously against the War on Women as they have against the “1%”, the economy, and the war — even though they “love” women (they have wives and daughters, after all). Women have very few genuine allies and friends among men. That is fact; not hyperbole.
What many proudly misogynistic, selfish, narcissistic, sexually repressed, emotionally stunted psychos say on talk radio, prime time TV, during political campaign season, and post online in social media sites and in commentaries to news articles about the War on Women with very little opposition from the “good guys” loudly and boldly denouncing this legitimized misogyny reveals a lot.
My grandmother once taught me: When someone shows you who they really are, believe them.
