Hate crimes against women are hate crimes
I mean … DUUUUUH. Right?
God, this crap is exhausting.
The UK is currently debating — debating! — whether to call violence against women hate crimes.
(I know, I know. At least the thought has occurred to them. In the US and much of the rest of the world, it seems to be inconceivable.)
The objections are always the same and always kind of funny in a hacking, gallows humor way.
Hate crimes? Women don’t have a problem with hate crimes. They lead sheltered, pampered lives and only emerge to persecute people by being “Karens.” (Yes, using “people” as if women aren’t is intentional. Misogynists think that way. You can tell because they speak that way. And you can tell how widespread it is by the fact that I have to point it out if I want to be sure everyone knows I’m doing it on purpose.)
Second stage is acknowledging that stuff happens but, hey, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Wolf whistles are compliments! Jealous stalkers are just showing how much they care! Rape is just guys getting carried away! Or something.
Third stage is saying it’s ridiculous. If we’re going to start jailing every wolf-whistling worker the police won’t have time for anything else.
Oh really? I thought that was a compliment. Apparently you know quite well which category it belongs in and that it’s covered nicely by “hate crime.” (No, it’s not the biggest hate crime in the world. But the daily, constant, cumulative erosion of women’s feeling of belonging in the world adds up to an enormous crime.)
Plus if actual enforcement means police are run off their feet dealing with hate crimes against women, how does that square with the dogma that women don’t have a problem?
That’s why they have to “debate” these crimes. Once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them. And then you lose your ability to comfortably think all the impossible things at once: that women are the pampered victims of rampant crime which doesn’t matter.
The one thing that matters right now is that an overtly supremacist entity is taking over the U.S. government.
The Catholic church does not allow me, or any one like me, who are over half the human race, any representation among those who make their laws nor among those who administer them. in the Catholic church, women are specifically excluded from being priests.
It’s not the funny dresses or the chants or swinging that incensor: the one relevant fact is that only priests become cardinals, only cardinals become Popes, and only Popes talk to (an inexplicably male) divine being, who tells said Pope how the rest of humanity has to act. And going back down the ladder from there, only men have the divine authority to force on the rest of the human race how we are to behave.
If this were on the basis of melanin, any organization or even religion would have been laughed out of influence since at least the 1960s. But because it’s the slave caste of women, the superceded-for-everyone-but-us 13th century concept of government by divine right in this so called democracy is about to become law for the majority in the twilight of this experiment in democracy.
Every single one of the “feminist” blogs that stood up for women’s rights as human rights in 2008 have run for cover. Either they’ve defended the overtly male supremacist Catholic religion as kin to the equally supremacist Orthodox faction of the Jewish religion, or they’ve just said “Eh, this is Catholic country, live with it” or they’ve said “At least the Catholics aren’t [pick your irrelevant fundie sect]”. None of these “feminists” stood up to, when it came down to it, the largest minority governed supremacist organization and state on the face of the earth, the Catholic religion.
But the men those “feminists” live with, the men whose opinions they care about, have successfully buried the simple fact that women have no representation at all, BECAUSE WE ARE WOMEN, in making or administering the laws of the Catholic church.
Their friends are Catholic, their boyfriends might be, their community is. They caved. And here we are.
earlynerd on October 21st, 2020 at 00:33
And just today I see that the Pope has broken with (Catholic) tradition and understood that gays (or gay men?) have human rights because they’re actual human beings like everyone else.
Women? {crickets} … still waiting.
Riverdaughter said it best once long ago when she was exasperated. Fully raw (male) cannibals will have rights before women do.
quixote on October 21st, 2020 at 12:47
That’s what makes me so frustrated about the current tunnel vision about racism.
Certainly, racism is a huge, horrible problem that destroys people’s lives.
Now magnify it by about 100 and you begin to get the scale and reach of the root bigotry of them all. Ruchira Gupta had a succinct tweet about it.
quixote on October 21st, 2020 at 12:54
I know, RD’s “fully raw cannibals” post never lost relevance. Infuriatingly, it’s only become more so.
I still think the reason for this is that the pool for white men’s house servants, baby makers, indentured sex partners, and indentured emotional support must be kept as wide and deep as possible. White men at every economic level feel a very deep almost subsonic anxiety if they aren’t assured of a large, comfortable margin of this despised caste waiting around for them. White men never hurried to give away any of the privileges other bigotries gave them, but this will be the last, because it benefits them immeasurably more than any other.
It keeps the ones they’ve already selected in line, too, because what else are they gonna do? Work for a living? Since the dismantling of Title VII (the Equal Opportunity law of 1964) for women, and for women only, we have been heading backwards into a full reprise of post-war 1940s, where women were forced out of all those “We Can Do It” jobs and back into being the smiling zombies that populated men’s homes in the 1950s.
BTW, women’s full civil, legal and human rights are the only ones that the male owned media and male controlled culture set again the rights of any other demographic. You never hear in response to same-sex marriage, for instance, “Oh, but women have it worse than gay men!” Or the reverse of that false dichotomy setting women’s rights against black men’s or even a knee jerk “And x is even worse for black women” every single time an injustice for black men is brought to national attention. It should have been an obvious trick by now, but from voting to employment to every other right for women in the U.S., it seems to work every time.
Guptera has a good point about how early the brainwashing begins and how corrosive it is. A few years ago, I started wondering why so many girls have grown up to accept their own inferior status. It was obvious why so many men who had loved their mothers and sisters would eventually sell them out when they became adults, but I started wondering what happened to girls that they became women who accepted this. Of all the brainwashing that it takes to make it okay to inflict harm and injustice on a whole swath of human beings, it takes an even greater amount to make that acceptable to the victims.
Religion has since its beginnings been one of the most effective at this. Until the 1950s and 1960s, major religions in America (the hypocritical Catholic church excepted) claimed their supreme being had made white people superior to all other races and therefore deserving of everything racism gave them. Unjust and inhuman as this was, it was not part of every moment of every day in the lives of the victims of racism.
For girls, religion (including those that gave black people a refuge from the culture around them) starts from the day they are born and continues with every ritual and every instruction and every church law, to personally drive home the message that they are inferior human beings. For parents who accept this, that message becomes part of every moment in the lives of their children. I think it is a miracle (and not a Catholic one!) that so many girls reject this – but the majority of white Catholics did vote for Trump.
Just to illustrate how pervasive this still is, the schools wealthy Catholic men send their boys to, like Kavenaugh’s, Roberts’, Alito’s and Collin Finnerty’s, are still sex segregated, as was the one that rescued Thomas from the racially segregated southern schools. Catholic schools are the only officially segregated school systems remaining in America. So those boys spend the most sensitive years of their lives, puberty and adolescence, isolated from girls and having the message reinforced that girls and women are inferior subhumans defined by their sexuality, while boys grow into men who would be pure angels of reason and light if it weren’t for us nasty temptresses. Brown v. Board of Education proved that segregation reinforces privilege and and harms the excluded children, but the Catholic church seems not to have gotten the message.
And now, Catholicism has given men another whipping boy to hold in front of them, to absorb the anger and blame for men’s injustices. The unqualified Supreme Court nominee is women’s Clarence Thomas, equally ludicrous as an actual judge and as much of an insult to her legendary predecessor, but she’ll be used an example of all women’s unworthiness in a way that Thomas has not been for black men. Same as the brilliant move of making a sexy blonde white woman the public face of Trump: *everyone* can safely hate her and ignore her boss and her boss’s bosses.
Earlynerd on October 21st, 2020 at 15:54
On a related note, I recently saw that yet another women who has been a hero of mine for decades because of her work, C.J. Cherryh, has been living an enviable life of agency as a gay woman and was finally able to marry her partner of many years.
Same as Carla Shroder, the author of many very accessible Linux manuals and articles in Linux’s early years as full-on nerdware. She now leads a pastoral life with her partner amid horses, dogs, cats, expensive machinery and huge workspaces.
I very much hope lesbian women are able to keep and expand the progress they’ve made towards full equality, along with gay men.
Earlynerd on October 21st, 2020 at 17:11
Aaannnd having discovered @CarlaSchroder as a result of this post, I cannot resist passing
this retweet on.
Good for at least one hearty giggle.
Earlynerd on October 21st, 2020 at 19:26
Well, looky here:
Add one more to the above list of graduates from cushy segregated schools.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/baquet-dean
Still can’t believe whining about “bias against Catholics” has any credence whatsoever among liberals – especially from those who routinely lecture people about their indelible implied racism, depending on which part of the country they grew up in, or their sex, if white and female.
Earlynerd on October 24th, 2020 at 14:23
Just to note, the picture in this post was from a major world wide conference on women’s rights.
In that 1995 conference, a male supremacist, minority (women are the majority of humans on the planet) governed organization was granted *state* status as an observer country. The Catholic church was the only religion of any kind to have this.
That would have been exactly parallel to granting the KKK official state status at an international conference on the human rights of black people.
The Catholic delegation predictably joined together with representatives of theocracies governed by the equally sexist but comparatively less lethal Muslim religion and fought a successful campaign to remove abortion from the absolute rights of women. If this had taken place today, they could have thrown in contraception and gotten away with it.
This is from an official government publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12179260/. Women’s rights have gone so far backward in America that a government article like this would be unthinkable today:
Those with the best of both worlds in this twilight of women’s rights in the U.S., the women who enjoy the economic and physical freedom made possible by others and who keep these by their silence, cowardice and determined avoidance of unpopular facts, should know that all of women’s rights in America are on the chopping block.
The Catholic church’s official position today on men raping their wives is that it is not rape: women “give their consent” to their husband’s permanent access to their bodies by the act of marriage. Anyone familiar with Catholicism in the 50s and 60s knows that even outside of marriage, those communities blamed girls and women, not boys and men, for rape. And of course, women must give their entire physical existence over to any pregnancy any man chooses to cause, by whatever means he chooses.
Further, the Catholic church opposes women being able to earn their own living. Their language on this is a paradigm of the transparent sexism that has been so obligingly taken up by the media: women’s primary “vocation” is marriage and children, so the men of the Catholic church are merely helping us women by working to keep us out of waged employment.
It is beyond despicable for the Catholic Church to claim as a human right freedom for their sexist religion, but to deny over half of humanity the most fundamental of human rights and freedoms.
The daughters and granddaughters of the women who would not stand up to religion will have the consolation of knowing their mothers and grandmothers helped ensure the elimination of Sambo’s restaurants, the use of “boy” for adult non-white men, the elimination decades ago of overtly racist laws and policies in the Mormon and Southern Baptist religions, the elimination of racially segregated tax supported schools and of legal racism in jobs and housing and of racist language and content in mainstream media.
Said daughters and granddaughters will of course be living with none of these rights, since restaurants like Hooters, being “girls” all their lives, mainstreamed sexist pejoratives, violent ponorgraphy, segregated jobs, superior male only schools, absolute dependence on a male “breadwinner”, and male violence and invasion of their bodies will be even more the norm for them than it is now.
But I’m sure they’ll love their moms every bit much as girls growing up in the 50s did.
Earlynerd on October 25th, 2020 at 15:05