This is actually not much of a rant. It's more like a lament, sparked by a couple of recent editorials in the New York Times. It's not very often that two pieces of writing on two completely different subjects juxtapose so neatly, one serving to explain the premise of the other though they appear largely unrelated. Or maybe it's just the way my brain works.
Anyway, the first of these was "Horton Sees an Image," a little piece discussing the implications of a new test showing that elephants are capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror—a possible sign of self-aware consciousness shared only by humans, apes, and dolphins, as far as we know. The pithy bit of the editorial was this:
We keep probing the animal world for signs of intelligence — as we define it — and we’re always surprised when we discover it. This suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with our assumptions. There is every reason to value other life-forms as much for their difference from us as for their similarity, and to act accordingly. [my emphasis] That may be the only intelligence test worthy of the name.
The lack of appreciation for differences, the inability to shift our own viewpoints to ask the fundamental questions from a different perspective is a major human failing. From the very beginning of the development of the scientific method, the prevailing philosophy of the Renaissance set the standard against which all else living is measured as Man, capital M. Supposedly, this was the all-inclusive Man of huManity. In reality, it was humenity.
Which leads me to the second editorial, Bob Herbert's "Punished for Being Female," a voice-in-the-wilderness reminder that half of the world's citizens suffer continuing abuse and fear simply because they harbor two X chromosomes. Herbert cites a recently released UN report that calls the violence against women a "war on women," consisting of rape, forced marriage, child marriage, kidnapping, forced prostitution, genital mutilation, sex slavery, prenatal sex selection and infanticide that "account for half a million missing girls in the last two decades," and the shocking statistic that 78% of women murder victims in the US are killed by a male acquaintance or partner. The acts perpetrated are largely peculiar to women victims. You don't see men being forced to marry their rapists, or doused with kerosene because their wives are unhappy with the marriage, or murdered randomly by the hundreds, as in Ciudad Juárez because the murders were pretty sure they could get away with it. Even if you count male circumcision as genital mutilation, it doesn't lead to the horrible health problems, infections, and deaths that so-called female circumcision does. When was the last time you heard of a society forbidding its men to get an education? Or making them virtual prisoners in their houses while their women went wherever they pleased?
The blatant imbalance in the apparent value of men and women in global society is astounding, and it can only be supported because men, who still have more political, economic, and brute physical power than women, continue to think of women as "other." Women are not just physically weaker, smaller, built differently, with different capabilities. Those differences, like the human differences from animals, make women less valuable, less worthy of the same rights and privileges men enjoy, because it makes them other than the gold standard, which is male. Whatever is not-male is, apparently, also fair game for ownership. Locking one's wife and daughter into the house is not that much different from tying one's dog in the yard, or locking an animal in a cage. This categorical otherness fosters the same false sense of ownership: my dog, my woman, my female child. (Male children sometimes have a more privileged status, but their size and immaturity also often make them other.) That sense of ownership too often leads to abuse or murder when women, those willful creatures, insists on asserting their independence of thought, their desire for freedom. You can't divorce me! You're mine! If I can't have you, nobody else will.
The root of this sense of ownership, the devaluing of difference from the standard, lies in men's wobbly position on the pedestal they put themselves on and the fear of what will happen if (when) they finally fall off it. What if women are not just a deviation from the standard of male physiology, chemistry, brain function? What if they are an equally fascinating and complex organism in their own right? What would that mean?
Change. That big, scary word.
My god! It could lead to riots in the street! Unisex bathrooms! The End Of Life As We Know It! Oh, the Horror!
Well, of course, it all comes down to loss of power and privilege. Or at least that's the standard theory. I'm less certain that's the core issue in keeping women terrorized and powerless, and harrying animals into extinction. The more I think about it, which is probably way too much, the more I've come to see it as more like a lack of empathy, an inability to put oneself in another's shoes. It also seems to be, at least in part, a profound sense of insecurity that's fostered in men by setting such absurd standards for manhood, in the same way that women's confidence is continually undermined by the impossible standards of beauty (and now achievement) we see in the media. Men all over the world seem to have to prove to each other every day that they are bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, tougher, more virile, can piss farther and longer, and are just better, in general, than other men. There doesn't seem to be a male society anywhere that isn't dominated by hierarchy and constant oneupmanship.
Don't you guys get tired of that? It must be a huge strain, always barking at the top dog to see if he'll roll over. The beauty of being human, though, is that we're not hard-wired to that action, no matter what comparisons between human and animal behavior socio-biologists make.
If men could stop using that hard-wiring nonsense as an excuse for bad behavior like institutionalized rape (because males are "programmed" to spread their genes around!), or violence, and just step back and look at themselves in the mirror, along with the elephants and the apes and the dolphins, alongside women, they could choose to be different, to act with empathy, with kindness, with mutual respect, with the credo of love and compassion that is the core of every religion worth the name. Stop turning everything into a power struggle. Let it go! It's a zero-sum game that you can just stop playing.
And if you "can't" as opposed to "won't" modify your behavior, maybe women should start tying you in the yard with the dog, which doesn't have any self-awareness either.
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