I actually missed the boat on this because I didn't know about it until today, thanks to a browse through the wonderful Radioactive Banana. I should have guessed, somehow, because (a) it's Women's History Month, and (b) Eleanor Smeal and several other Ms. Magazine types were at B&N the other night, agitating on whether women could stop the war. I had a horrible flashback and thought it was 1971 all over again. It was, in Yogi Berra's words, deja vu all over again. In that spirit, I give you the words of a postcard I bought years ago in England:
Because woman's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get the sack and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get bashed we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and /or pushy and if we expect community care for children we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and . . . for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement.
I feel obliged to add the personal disclaimer that in the paragraph above are specific issues I do not support. But what I do support is women's right to the same kind of rights, freedoms, responsibilities, privileges, wages, respect, and self-determination that men enjoy. I support our right to be free of double standards, to be equal under the law, to not be condescended to because we do not exactly mirror the male of the species, to not be thought inferior though we might be (physically) weaker, when we are—not "different" from men, who are not the gold standard against which all else is measured, but—merely ourselves.
Far more important than any of these issues are the issues of women's safety in the world outside this comfortable coterie of developed nations, whose discrimination is more subtle. In Iran, where women were beaten by police for gathering in public to celebrate International Women's Day. In Darfur, where women are being raped and murdered as part of government genocide. In the Congo, in Pakistan, in India, in Mexico, in Chechnya, women are in peril of their lives, simply for being women.
That any of this even needs to be said is not just a crime, but shameful.
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