http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/war-on-women-march-april-28_b_1457730.html
Soraya Chemaly
Feminist, Satirist and Media Critic
American women need to be recognized as full citizens. Yes, women in
this country. It's me again, sitting in my office, by myself, saying that "equal enough" is NOT. But, I am not alone.
Tomorrow, Saturday, April 28th, thousands of women and men will
participate in 53 marches and rallies for women's rights in 45 states
and the District of Columbia. These events are part of
UNITEWOMEN.ORG movement against the
War on Women.
In truth, I don't care what the sustained legislative assault on
women's rights by the Republican party is called. Nor do I care,
actually, for the Unitewomen moniker, because although I am happy for
anything that offsets a cultural preference to portray women as enemies,
I believe that men and women who understand the importance and benefits
of equality must work together. However, I agree wholeheartedly with
UNITEWOMEN.ORG's goals and intent. If you are not joining them, you
should ask yourself why and consider
doing it.
Why should you march?
Because women's and girls' fundamental rights, to privacy, to
life, to bodily integrity, to chose when to plan their reproduction are
being violated.
Because women can't afford to nor should be forced to live their lives according to rules that assume they are dependent on men.
Because women and girls should not be punished, denigrated
and publicly humiliated for speaking civilly and intelligently in their
own interest or making their own choices.
Because boys and girls should be taught what equality, not entitlement, means.
Without fail, when I talk to people about gender inequality in the
United States, someone inevitably says some variation of this: "Compared
to other women, women here are equal enough." First of all, women are
not in competition with other women for safety from violence
and freedom. Second, this type of comparison, with its echo of threat,
is an unacceptable and irrelevant framework for considering citizenship
and protection under the law. Women are citizens and should have the
full rights and privileges of citizens.
We should. But we don't.
If you are uncertain about what I am saying and think I am
exaggerating the harm, consider the effect of one distillation of
events: the degree to which the conservative "political" agenda
requires
that all women, regardless of color, faith, economic status or sexual
preference, seek men's review and approval before acting. (Those
factors, race, economic status, sexual preference magnify the effect.) "
Informed consent, " "
permission slips," wage policies determined because "
money may be more important to men," "
man-up finances," women's health care being determined by
all-male religious leaders and congressional panels,
refusal to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act
because of homophobia (and racism). On and on and one: every time the
baseline requirement for women to exercise their rights and live freely
is the intervention and approval of men. This is not just unfair to
girls and women, but imposes unreasonable responsibilities and pressures
on boys and men.
Even the phrasing of hot button issues -- "
Mommy Wars" and "
Slutgate"
-- are coded conversations that define women, their health, their
choices and their incomes primarily in terms of their relationships to
men. Those frameworks are unacceptable. These attempts to legislate the
subordination of women are not just distasteful and embarrassing but
designed ultimately to humiliate women and keep them in their place.
TO BE CLEAR: This is not a man-bashing exercise. I do not hate men. I hate inequality and oppression. This is about men
and
women being mutually central as humans and, together, fighting
systematized biases against girls' and women's full engagement with the
world.
All over the world women seek equality. Men and women, who
understand this, fight against everything from subtle, cultural sexism
to extreme and violent gendered oppression. Here, in the US, many
people really do think women are "equal enough." I am told we should
"consider ourselves lucky." I am not going to compare oppressions. Nor
am I in any way dismissing the dehumanizing and life-crushing hatred
that women face in too many places on the planet. But, because others
are violently deprived of rights and life does not mean that we should
be content with circumscribed rights and lives. Women should not have to
be thankful for hard-won rights, be penalized for seeking to live
better lives or have to settle for "enough" when it comes to equality.
In theory, we are citizens with full rights.
Republicans would have you believe that the word "war" is
not a valid way to describe the assault on women's rights represented by the
hundreds of bills (916 since January 2012 alone)
and laws they've pursued or enacted during the past two years. This
attitude is unsurprising. What is surprising to me however, is the
degree to which these assaults reveal the Republican abandonment, when
it comes to women, of three core beliefs of their own party, namely:
• Our country was founded on the fundamental principle that individuals have rights and freedoms
• Government intervention into the lives of private citizens should be limited
• Traditional values and freedoms of the American Republic should be reaffirmed
Either they are betraying their belief in, for example, individual
rights and limited government or they are demonstrating that they don't
believe women are genuinely included in the definition of individual
citizens with full rights and privileges. Time and again, women and
their rights are made marginal and secondary to almost everything else
and debated away as a matter of expedience.
You should march because this is unacceptable.
It is evident that conservatives do not believe women can be trusted
to think for themselves and make their own decisions... about when to
become parents, money, faith.. nothing. Instead, in almost every sphere
of life, their agenda is designed to keep women dependent on the good
graces of men and competing for the resources that men have
traditionally provided and keep them vulnerable in the process. That
belief seems largely derived from
Complementarianism,
a worldview of gender roles as different but complementary, in which
there are requirements made of men (as heads of households and public
life) and restrictions placed on women, who are essentially limited to
childrearing. It is one thing for people to chose this model privately,
but it should not be enshrined in law, imposed on everyone and enforced
judicially and legislatively to undermine equality and freedom. Yet,
like a slow moving train wreck, that's what is happening.
As I said, it isn't about individual men and their relative goodness.
It's about systematized bias, gender hierarchies and how power,
responsibilities and rights are distributed. And, also for the record,
before anti-feminist trolls come out of the commenting woodwork, I
believe women should fight in combat in military wars. And, yes, I
know, these systems are supported by both men and women. That's how
Complementarianism works. It's a primary vector for ambivalent and
paternalistic sexism's cultural sanction and enforcement by women.
Writer Erin Solaro
put it this way in a commentary on women and war and freedom:
"At the core of citizenship is the idea that the citizen's
body is hers and hers alone, regardless of sexual history, marital
status or childbearing... The full citizenship of women is not just
about the right to hold credit cards, buy real estate in our own names,
have access to abortion and birth control and lead openly lesbian lives
in which marriages and adoptions are legally recognized. These things
are important in themselves -- terribly so, to the point of sometimes
being matters of life and death -- but what they represent is vastly
more important. They are part of a woman's citizenship and freedom, the
right of a woman to fully inhabit her own life and participate fully in
the life of the polity (in this case the American Republic) as a public
and private equal."
You should march because women have yet to be recognized as full citizens, with agency in both the private and public spheres.
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