It’s Not Conservative Logic, It’s Male Supremacy

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine: Right the Truth is a Lie

 

People are asking why the medical community has been silent in the wake of all the punitive policies of mandatory ultrasound laws, waiting periods, and other woman-hating laws that are “forcing” doctors to withhold vital information from pregnant patients that may influence their decision to get an abortion or even request tubal ligation before any unwanted pregnancies occur. None of this cultural apathy and cruelty towards women and girls occurs in a vacuum, or happens in a society where most men are “good.” Let us remember that the majority of doctors — members of one of the most privileged groups of “professionals” who are above reproach because the paternalistic and patriarchal medical establishment is self-policing — support Mitt Romney. And by default, that means they also support the rest of the Congressional poster boys for the right-wing’s pro-forced birth/rapists’ rights bowel movement.

It’s not only because the members of this privileged, male-dominated profession (who are supposed to be “ethical”) care more about buying their second million-dollar home, their yachts, their Mercedez Benz, and their country club memberships than poor and uninsured women having any access to health care; it’s also because they care more about their own comforts, luxuries and privileges than they do about the basic human rights of women and girls — namely, the basic human rights to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity which is the first pillar of bioethics.

And it’s no secret that misogynistic, patriarchal men have the support of cruel, selfish women who have sold their souls — those willing handmaids of the patriarchy to do their dirty work for them, who are eager to throw their least fortunate sisters and our daughters under the bus in exchange for some temporary and transitory privileges and power under patriarchy. Hence, the “honorary men” who have everything but the penis like Kathleen Passidomo, the Florida lawmaker who referred to 11 year old rape victims as “prostitutes.”

The male-centric medical profession has a long, sordid history of self-administered black eyes where women’s human rights are concerned. Its membership knows full well that Mitt Romney and the men he backs as vice president, judges and Congressmen have a well-documented track record of woman-hating policies. The medical community knows full well that Mitt Romney, if elected president, will appoint US Supreme Court judges that will overturn Roe v. Wade and sign Congressmen’s bills that would get rid of Planned Parenthood, forcing women and girls to become pregnant and give birth against their will no matter the harm to us, and without any consideration for how we feel about it.

They know full well that Mitt Romney backs pro-rapist, hyper-patriarchal Congressional candidates who would have your sister, your wife, your girlfriend, or your 11 year old daughter bear her rapist’s progeny against her will no matter the harm to her since a “legitimate rape” would have “shut the whole thing down.” The medical establishment did not even utter a tepid response to refute Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” tripe by stating that pregnancy can happen regardless if the sex that caused it was consensual or not. This has not gone unnoticed.

The paternalistic medical constabulary has been conspicuously silent throughout the War On Women and has even quietly supported and promoted lawmakers and leaders who passed and enforced policies of forced pregnancy/childbirth — contravening the UN Convention On Torture which specifically includes in its legal language the definition of “torture” to also mean “rape, sexual assault, and forced pregnancy”; which was ratified by the US Senate in 1994.

None of this should come as a surprise. It’s not like there’s never been a precedent of socially sanctioned and approved medical torture and cruelty towards women and girls for the good of “God and country.” The male-dominated medical establishment of Reich medicine in 1930’s Nazi Germany, which boasted some of the finest minds of Berlin, supported and carried out some of the most horrific and torturous medical experiments primarily targeting women and children in Auschwitz. Does Dr. Josef Mengele ring a bell, anyone? The Reich medical establishment also supported and willingly participated in carrying out the Nazi’s Liebensborn Programme of state-sanctioned rape and forced pregnancy/childbirth against “Aryan” women and girls in order to cement the “divine” social order of male supremacy and increase the “master race.”

Hitler’s adversary Joseph Stalin also implemented policies of forced childbearing in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union using the moral imperative to replace Soviet troops that sustained the largest military casualties out of all the Allied Forces and it is also well-documented that Soviet soldiers raped and sexually tortured defenseless female civilians. Male violence and cruelty towards women is not solely within the purview of religious zealots and right-wing goose-stepping fascists.

As an aside, the women and girls who were raped by Nazi soldiers and high ranking Nazi officers and forced to give birth were not left destitute, homeless, and without food, clothing, decent housing and medical care — unlike America’s working class and poor jobless women and girls are today who are also victims of our rape culture and forced childbirth laws and policies. That is what is really telling about the degree to which America hates its daughters.

And it’s almost impossible for women and girls to prove they were raped. Even when it is caught on video tape or captured on iPods and cell phone cameras, men deny that it’s rape. It’s only rape when it happens to males, and just “sex” when it happens to females. The word “rape” has been banned in many courtrooms across the US. Judges often demand that women and girls say that they “had sex” with their rapists, not that they were raped by them. 31 states grant rapists “fathers’ rights”, including the right to joint custody (eliminating child support for the mother), and visitation rights, forcing their victims to not only give birth against their will to their rapists’ progeny but also forcing the victims to have ongoing contact with their rapists who use the children they’ve sired as a ready-made tool for controlling every aspect of their victims’ lives for 18 years. These “fathers” can petition courts (and have) to prevent their victims from moving to another state or even another town in order to get a job and pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. It is downright sadistic to compel women and girls to participate in their own degradation, enslavement, and abuse to support the rapist.

Pennsylvania state lawmakers are trying to pass a state law that not only cuts miserly inadequate welfare assistance to needy families but also contains a provision stating that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant and needs welfare as a result, she will be required to prove to the satisfaction of some middle class bureaucrat that she was raped or else she won’t get anything — not food assistance, not medical assistance, nothing. That dubious law is House Bill No. 2718. Pennsylvania also set a legal precedent a few years ago in which the courts ruled that when a woman says “No”, she doesn’t really mean it. It’s just foreplay. So that’s the Catch-22: How can a woman prove she was raped when the courts refuse to recognize anything as rape? Even when they had a videotape (males can’t help but brag about their “conquests”) of 5 boys raping an unconscious under-aged girl, they still said that the boys were not guilty of rape.

Normalized and legitimized cruelty towards women and girls is not because of a few isolated incidents of misogyny reduced to the deeds of a “few bad apples.” It’s the natural outcome of an entire male supremacist society full of enablers, justifiers, enforcers, reinforcers, excuse-makers and promoters across ALL racial and socio-economic class lines in support of the patriarchal status quo. A society that never cared about women and girls except to use, abuse, enslave and exploit as sexual currency and reproductive chattel as disposable sperm receptacles and fetus containers with a limited shelf life.

One need not look back to the 20^th century horrors of Nazi Europe to find socially and politically motivated male supremacist-driven policies and practices of medical torture and sexual cruelty specifically aimed at women and girls. One only needs to look at contemporary doctors and policy-shaping medical organizations, including university teaching hospitals, to find plenty of examples of unethical medical abuse and misogyny against women and girls — doctors like Dix Poppas, Chief of Pediatric Urology at Cornell University who experimented on female children under anesthesia, removing pieces of their genitals and then stimulating them with vibrators to “prove” that his surgery “spares nerves.” In order to test the girls (whose average age was only six) to see if they were still capable of sexual arousal after having their clitorises altered, Poppas used a vibrator to stimulate their surgically altered clitorises — often while the parents watched on. [1]

How does a 6 year old know what a “healthy” or “normal” active sexual response is supposed to be to an older man in a sterile suit applying a vibrator to her now-operated-on genitals? And just who defines the “proper” sexual response criteria for a 6 year old child having her clitoral region stimulated? This study, which ended in 2007, apparently passed the (male-centric) guidelines of medical ethics.

Then there are doctors like Lloyd Hammon Barlow, the FLDS physician who attended the 12 and 13 year old girls that gave birth at the Yearning For Zion Mormon compound in Eldorado, Texas before it was raided in 2008 by Child Protective Services. Dr. Barlow stated in an affidavit filed by CPS worker Paul Dyer that he didn’t believe that the forced arranged marriages of these adolescent girls to much older men and the subsequent forced pregnancies and births constituted “abuse.” In the FLDS, women and girls are expected to give birth without any pain relief and, adding insult to injury, are expected to give birth in utter agony without crying out from the pain. Screaming from the excruciating pain of giving birth without pain relief is grounds for the offending female to be “disciplined” by her husband. If that’s not abuse, torture and cruelty and sanctioned male violence against women, then what is?

Then there are doctors who aren’t in any zealous religious community who find nothing wrong with abusing, torturing and terrorizing gravid women in the delivery room by denying them pain relief and verbally abusing them for crying — even while administering episiotomies and then stitching them up after the birth — because they think that women “deserve to suffer pain.” That was the sort of maternity “care” that Catherine Skol, a Chicago policewoman, was subjected to by Dr. Scott Pierce, the on-call OB/GYN who delivered her fifth baby.[2]

Dr. Pierce got a mere fine. He didn’t lose his license and he faced no criminal charges. In fact, Catherine Skol’s sadistic medical abuser got more public sympathy and support than she did as the victim. People reacted horribly to Skol for her unwillingness to just shut up and suffer quietly like a good little girl, blaming her (and other women who suffered similarly that tried to seek legal remedy) for skyrocketing health insurance premiums and a dearth in OB/GYN’s due to “frivolous lawsuits” and cost-prohibitive malpractice insurance.  Our woman-hating society blamed every patriarchal wrong — everything from abuse and medical torture to unaffordable health care — on the victims of misogynistic male cruelty and sadism. The American public blames the women who have been hurt.

Inconsiderate people even justified their victim-blaming with even more victim-blaming, saying that maybe she (Skol) and other women who suffered in childbirth “should have thought about that before having sex.” And it was not only men doling out this vitriol; there were plenty of women who piled on, too: Women who sold their souls for a generous helping of the toxic lentil soup prepared and served up by patriarchy’s professional bullshit chefs.

If just one man were to suffer comparable abuse at a physician’s hands like being denied pain relief during a vasectomy and being held down and yelled at while being cut and sutured, the whole world would come to an end. But in our male supremacist society, women are “less than” and therefore subjected to all sorts of social condemnation and punishment for trying to speak up about their rights and trying to fight back against abuse. Women are routinely silenced because we’re expected to just suck it up and take it because we’re not fully human — men are the only “real people” who matter.

Rape. Torture. Medical abuse. Sexual and reproductive cruelty. Sexual exploitation. Job discrimination. Poverty. All of this and so much more is the price this woman-hating male supremacist society inflicts on women and girls — for the “crime” of being female. Need anyone really ask how things got so bad for women and girls that even access to birth control is being eliminated? This society allowed it to happen the same way that all those “good Germans” allowed the Holocaust to happen — by accepting male violence against women, the male chauvinism, the abuse, and discrimination against an entire identifiable group of people they deem as sub-human.

The War On Women is not the result of conservative logic, it’s the result of socially accepted and unquestioned male supremacy.

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[1] “Bad Vibrations”, Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder, Bioethics Forum, 06/16/2010; The Hastings Center Report, September-October 2012, Vol. 42 No. 5; http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4730&blogid=140

[2] Skol v. Pierce and Rush University Medical Center d/b/a Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center

Call It What It Is — MALE Violence Against Women

by Elaine Charkowski

If you like this article, please post and share it with at least three women and it will go viral!

Breaking the silence by naming an atrocity — and its perpetrators — is the first step toward ending it. Patriarchy is a 6,000 year-old, male-supremacist social system. To maintain it, “Women’s agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable and the jig would be up,” said Sonia Johnson in “Telling the Truth,” which is chapter 10 of her book Going Out of Our Minds-The Metaphysics of Liberation.

MALE violence against women must be named specifically in order to isolate it so it can be eradicated. Women, who outnumber men, are the single largest group of oppressed humans on the planet. Men have oppressed women nonstop for the longest length of time of any oppressed group, roughly 6,000 years (The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler).

A young woman once told me that dealing with male violence “was just part of being a woman!” However, it’s the moral responsibility of the group holding the most power to keep its members from oppressing people in groups holding less power. Thus, ALL men are responsible for stopping male violence against women. Violent men must stop assaulting women. Non-violent men must not sit by and allow male violence against women to continue. To do so is to condone it. Their inaction-or indifference-is passive male violence against women.
Silence is complicity.

Here are nine of the most popular evasions often used to avoid naming MALE violence specifically and to avoid holding ALL men responsible for ending male violence against women:

1. “Not all men are violent.”
No one said they were. Since men collectively hold more power than women, and since all men benefit from living in a sexist, male supremacist society, non-violent men are also responsible for stopping male violence against women. In the same way, whites, who collectively hold more power than people of color (in the U.S.) are responsible for ending racism, even whites who don’t commit racist acts. This is because all whites benefit from living in a racist society that gives whites unearned advantages.

2. “Women are violent too.”
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Mary Daly calls this “universalism.” Muddying the waters, it blurs the specific focus on male violence against women by blending it with violence in general (universal violence) and casting it as a gender-neutral human issue (see examples of universalism in excuse #3 below).

Also, under patriarchy, women are blamed for their own degradation (being violent, collaborating with men against women, etc.) As Mary Daly wrote in her book  Pure Lust, (p.365) “Within the Virulent State of phallocracy, women have been attacked and divided against our Selves. From the earliest times of the patriarchy, countless mothers have been broken and the resulting broken daughters have carried on the chain of fragmentation. . . .

“They have been reduced to responding to the fettered/fathered urge to reproduce their altered–(that is, patriarchally identified selves)– in an endless circle of Self destruction. Such forcibly altered women have appeared to be normal within the man made milieu.”

Although it exists, female violence pales in comparison to male violence. Men commit 88 percent of violent crime (US Bureau of Justice statistics). Women don’t build rape camps to torture and molest men to death. Women don’t control the U.S. government which spends more than half a trillion dollars a year on mass murder (war). Globally, women can’t walk alone without the possibility of men assaulting them. The reverse is not true. Even though some broken token women may collaborate with patriarchal men to gain power (Condi Rice, Margaret Thatcher etc.) it doesn’t change the fact that patriarchal men are in charge and allow selected token “honorary men” into the boys club–if they identify with, and behave like, patriarchal men.

3. “Since violence is a human problem committed by both sexes, and since women also commit violence against women, MALE violence against women doesn’t have to be isolated and named specifically.”

Here are some examples of universalism (“women are violent too” etc.) The power disparity between women and men is the reason for some women’s dysfunctional behavior. It is not an excuse for it:

• “Some lesbians also better their partners”
This results from internalized dysfunctional heterosexual behavior absorbed from a patriarchal society in which the dominating partner (the man) batters the woman. Male violence against women is the blueprint for lesbian vs lesbian battering.

•“Some women also commit racist violence against women”
Racism (male violence based on race) was created and implemented by dysfunctional men to “divide and conquer.” Male violence based on the “otherness” of the oppressed is the blueprint for racist attacks inflicted by some women upon “other” women. This results when women internalize racism and identify with the dominating race (including men)-instead of bonding with oppressed women. Racism is only possible when inflicted by the race possessing the most political and economic power (racism=prejudice+power over). Thus, women of dominated races cannot commit racism against women of the dominating race-only prejudice. Male violence against women of the same race is clearly seen as sexism. However, male violence against women of different races is often obscured by being seen as just racism instead of racism and sexism.

•“Some women also exploit women sexually and economically.”
Hatred and contempt of women-including themselves-is the underlying issue. Women who exploit other women identify with and see themselves through the eyes of the oppressor (male supremacists who have contempt for women).

4. The absent referent.
The “absent referent” refers to something without naming it. Mary Daly in her book “Quintessence” wrote, “Naming the agent is required for an adequate analysis of atrocities.” As linguist Julia Penelope has shown in her book, “Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues,” “agent deletion is a dangerous and common mind-muddying flaw.” Agent deletion is common, concerning male violence against women. Timid terms such as “sexual violence,” “domestic violence” “gender-based violence,” and “violence” refer to men without naming them, even when describing instances when it was obviously men who raped hundreds of thousands of women in Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and many other nations. Even Amnesty International, which calls it “a global scourge,” uses the term “violence against women” and “sexual violence” instead of “male violence against women.”

5. “Men also rape men and boys.”
Rape is a male hate crime against women. However, the use of universalism (see #3) attempts to portray rape as a gender-neutral atrocity. The fact that men also rape men and boys doesn’t change the fact that in every nation on earth, in all levels of society, men rape women. Even when men rape males, contempt for women is the underlying issue. Men rape males to degrade them by treating them like raped women.

If white supremacist men batter or murder a black man, it’s clearly seen as a racist hate crime, even though white man also batter white men. In the same manner, rape is a hate crime against women, even though men also rape men.

6. “What we resist persists.”
Supposedly, opposing something directly “gives it more power.” If racism and sexism were not opposed directly in the U.S., black people would still be enslaved. Women would still be men’s property, unable to vote, own a business or keep their own wages. If the Nazis were not opposed directly, they would now run the world.
Opposing women’s oppression directly is only one tactic. Another is being proactive by supporting women in their efforts to gain universal human rights. This can be done by volunteering at women’s shelters, donating to groups that help women in impoverished nations and many other ways. Both tactics are necessary.

7. The “passive voice.”
In English grammar, using the passive voice (women were raped by men) instead of the active voice (men raped the women) shifts the focus from the perpetrators and their actions (men doing the raping) to their victims (the women being raped).

8. “Boys will be boys.”
Patriarchal cultures promote “nature over nurture” (biological determinism) and claim men are “naturally violent.” This legitimizes and perpetuates war and men’s abuse of women. Abnormal violent “manhood” is regarded as the norm. However, men are naturally peaceful. Archaeological evidence shows men enjoyed and maintained 1,500 years of peace in ancient Crete! It’s proven today by famous non-violent men such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other men who organize against warfare and who speak out against male violence against women. It takes years of traumatic conditioning (while being immersed in a violent society) to make men violent. “Military training camps, police academies and even some self-defense pros are constantly searching for more effective methods of suppressing the human revulsion to taking human life.” – See “The Science of Creating Killers”
If men were “naturally violent,” years of brutal conditioning by violent media and in boot camps would not be needed.

9. “Societies were always patriarchal and men have always dominated women.”
Thousands of years of women’s history has been nearly erased by patriarchal men. Marija Gimbutas, the world renowned archaeologist who wrote Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe unearthed many relics from around the world that proves men didn’t always dominate women and that women and men once shared power in peaceful non-patriarchal Goddess worshipping. societies. Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade cites many more instances proving this.

“Democracy does not yet exist anywhere”

Robin Morgan wrote The Demon Lover which is a study of the link between terrorism in the home (“domestic violence” or more accurately, MALE violence against women in the home) and global terrorism. Terrorism, (MALE violence against women) both in the home and in ALL the societies of the world, supports patriarchy and is a necessary component.

Morgan said, “The majority of the population in virtually all nation states is female and is forced by patriarchy to obey, be silent, and acquiesce-which means that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist anywhere.”

The necessary foundation for the creation of democracy is universal human rights for women. This cannot be achieved unless global MALE violence against women is eradicated. The question is how can we accomplish this? Men have had more than 6,000 to stop their endless war against women, and they haven’t stopped. So it falls to women to accomplish this.

From The Ship that sailed into the Living Room by Sonia Johnson:

“My formative years were spent during men’s so-called Second World War. From that war and from reading since, I learned some of the tactics that had had to be invented to prevent the escape of prisoners.

Generally, when a group of men was captured, as soon as possible the captors got them into some sort of holding corral—some cordoned-off space—and set guards to watch them.

“Among the prisoners, leaders would soon arise, those men who might, for instance, urge others around them not to cooperate with the enemy until they were all given water. In some way, those who were less afraid, surer of themselves, and therefore most likely to organize rebellions or escapes, soon identified themselves.

“Their captors discovered through trial and error that to prevent trouble they had either to execute these leaders immediately or to put them in solitary confinement—one man to one cell with his own private guard. The analogy is obvious.

“When men dreamed of controlling women and hence the world, every woman was just such a leader—one of those who would disrupt and defeat the hell-plans. So during the war men have fought against us for thousands of years, they have had either to kill us or to put us in solitary confinement—one woman to one guard in one cell . . . .”

There has been only ONE war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men’s all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.