Okay, don’t shut up. Wail, rage, weep. And you guys who have yet to start listening, now might be a good time.
Imus, Markos, Cho-Seung Hui, The Supreme Court, Charles Carl Robert IV, Duane Morrison, The Taliban, Snoop Dog.
My head is spinning and my heart is breaking. Misogyny is everywhere. And we are told to be quiet, play by men’s rules, quit whining. It is apparently, our fault, that women and girls are being attacked from every side.
Imus. Hate talk. Reflected a lot of issues that are considered acceptable by large parts of our population. Enabled by a lot of people who were willing to look the other way because their wealth or fame would increase by looking the other way.
Markos Just get the hell out of his way. Don’t even think about messing up his gig by insisting on respect and equal rights. Enabled by people who want to hang out with the cool kid.
Cho Seung-Hui Disturbed and violent male who stalked women over a period of years. Enabled by women who declined to press charges and by a School Administration that took only half-hearted actions to help him or rein him in. VTU administration also failed to close down campus after the first shootings assuming they were “only” domestic in nature.
The Supreme Court Dismissed women’s right to make decision about their own health. Enabled by weak-willed Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Charles Carl Roberts IV A 32-year-old milk truck driver who entered an Amish school in Pennsylvania and shot 10 girls. Enabled by a culture of violence in this country and a media that failed, in large part, to relate the inciident to the broader epidemic of violence against females.
Duane Morrison A 53-year-old walked into a Colorado high school and took six girls hostage. Isolated in a classroom, he sexually assaulted the girls before killing 16-year-old Emily Keyes and himself. Enabled by the same group as above.
The Taliban egregious suppression of women’s rights and violence against women. Enabled by the American Government until an attack occurred on our soil. Still enabled by our government, since the mission in Afghanistan was never completed.
Snoop Dog and all the other gangsta rappers who are supposedly only lash out against evil women who only want to exploit the brothers. Enabled by music industry executives who making a ton of money.
Of course we could also look at rape as a tool of repression in Bosnia, Darfur and Pakistan. I’m sure I’ve forgotten countless others.
And back here in the gold `ol USA, the statistics are grim.
MURDER. Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That’s approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.
BATTERING. Although only 572,000 reports of assault by intimates are officially reported to federal officials each year, the most conservative estimates indicate two to four million women of all races and classes are battered each year. At least 170,000 of those violent incidents are serious enough to require hospitalization, emergency room care or a doctor’s attention.
SEXUAL ASSAULT. Every year approximately 132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than half of them knew their attackers. It’s estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it. Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once.
THE TARGETS. Women are 10 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate. Young women, women who are separated, divorced or single, low- income women and African-American women are disproportionately victims of assault and rape. Domestic violence rates are five times higher among families below poverty levels, and severe spouse abuse is twice as likely to be committed by unemployed men as by those working full time. Violent attacks on lesbians and gay men have become two to three times more common than they were prior to 1988.
IMPACT ON CHILDREN. Violent juvenile offenders are four times more likely to have grown up in homes where they saw violence. Children who have witnessed violence at home are also five times more likely to commit or suffer violence when they become adults.
Women, stay strong, empower your daughters, teach your sons, take support from the decent men around us. We’ve got work to do. A lot of work.
Raise your voices and say “Enough.”
What can i say, Kahli. Unfortunately a half-century of life on this planet seems to have toughened my skin to the point where my heart doesn’t break every hour, every day.
It’s fashionable to think that old women are fragile, but it takes an awful lot of stamina just to get to be one.
I take heaert from younger women like you and Rutgers team captain Essence Carson,who said of Imus’s remark “It was an attack on women first.” You both are not distracted by the dust of racism thrown in your eyes, but are seeing the dirty truth of woman-hatred we’re ashamed to face.
It does take a lot of stamina.
I have a half-century of it under my belt as well. ; )
No! But you look so young to my mind’s eye.
Does seem like a there’s been a perfect storm of anti-women incidents lately, doesn’t it? Very well written Kahli.
Thank you.
It’s been there this whole time, we are just noticing it more because it is what we are thinking about.
Kudos Kahli…this was a great diary. We have come a long way, but the road is so much longer still.
Steven, by treating your daughter with respect and teaching her that she is strong and second to none, you are helping to end sexism. Thank you.
I will not STFU.
I will not STFU.
Thank you!
Some days, it just makes you want to bang your head on the wall, doesn’t it?
A lovely quote I dug up awhile back:
This was the beginning of an effort to tell women that their only real job was reproducing (and home schooling) children for the sake of the homeland.
Dr. Groß, “Nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik. Eine Rede an die deutschen Frauen (Dessau, C. Dünnhaupt, 1934
It was the beginning of the Holocaust.
Geez. I didn’t know that. It all fits doesn’t it?
My grandmother lived in a family of 13 kids. Two died before they were out of diapers. My great grandmother died having her last child. Then my great grandfather started sexually molesting his daughters. My grandmother was forced to marry a man chosen for her. She was a bitter, venomous person for most of the time that I knew her, and no wonder.
Yeah, they were so happy back then with their big families and no birth control.
My great-grandfather was also a minister.
was he a Baptist minister?
Throughout life, I’ve found that Baptists and Catholics have swept the most “dirt” under the rug.
There’s this irrational & crazy (perceived) fear of eternal damnation and of burning in hell.
Of greatest import, the women had no economic means to leave said batterers (nor were most allowed to divorce, unless they could prove grounds of cruel and abusive treatment).
Impossible to do, BTW–batterers function on isolation, etc.
While immersed in geneaology, it’s taken 12 generations to purge patriarchal notions of a woman’s “place” in my biological families of origin.
My maternal G-grandfather left the most control-freakish will (and codicil–he was hell-bent on controlling looooooooong after his death) I’ve ever read (and I’ve read quite a few, trust me).
That asshole bequeathed a whopping $5.00 to my grandmother.
What a fine specimen of a batterer, huh?
Fortunately, he treated his son (there were only two adult children in the family) equally as abusively–his son petitioned probate court and waived all rights; contested the will (the father had appointed a lawyer as his son’s permanent guardian or any/all financial affairs).
In the final analysis, my grandmother and her brother (both of whom were in their fifties) trumped his damned will and codicil; and the brother bequeathed a substantial sum to his sister (my grandmother); as well as to his housekeeper, and my mother (and her two adult siblings).
This included quite a bit of cash (1939), bonds, and real estate.
I’ll never apologize for being a feminist…nada.
When women don’t control their social, political, and financial means throughout their lifetimes–expect a lifetime of poverty.
My daughter and I are the first generations in that line (as well as my paternal line) to have attended and have graduated from college; and I faithfully used various forms of pharmalogical birth control for decades, so that I could control my means of reproductive labor (one child only, thanks).
The “old days” weren’t so happy and idyllic, indeedy.
Quite the understatement.
This same grandmother’s proverbial butt was saved by an empathic uncle of hers, who migrated to CA during the 1860s–he was a self-made real estate speculator, he and his wife never had children, and he bequeathed a substantial sum (for that era) to my grandmother & her immediate family.
All of which afforded them the opportunity to get the hell out of this abusive G-grandfather’s home (they were stuck living w/him & providing unpaid labor).
They were gone in a flash; and my mother said that he was more than pissed–esp. that they “wasted” money on a vehicle (batterers not only isolate, but also control one’s mobility and ‘space’).
His father (my maternal Gg-grandfather) had the audacity to “keep” another woman as his “housekeeper,” and refused to grant his wife a divorce…she lived on the same property (over 200 acres) up the road w/her “spinster” adult daughter. So, asshole control freak males do run on that line of the family, folks.
She outlived him by decades; and I don’t know how the two of them got by (finanacially speaking)–they must have sold off property, as social security benefits (which are only half of what a male earned in today’s economy) did not exist.
Even in death, their stones are in two separate cemetery lots (guess who tends those lots? Yep…me).
About 15 yrs. ago, my mother replaced said asshole G-grandfather’s grave marker; and I bitched her out for doing so…I would’ve let it disintegrate further.
When I tend that particular cemetery, I always make a point to never clip around his marker–I want to take a shit on it!
However, the only stones I tend (I clip around them, as the groundskeepers aren’t paid shit; and the ‘perpetual care’ fees paid decades ago don’t quite cover adequate care); and I only tend the the markers and place a nice flower arrangement for that Gg-grandmother and that of her adult ‘spinster’ daughter.
Although I’m an atheist, it does render a feeling of satisfaction to ignore that bastard’s marker/lot while in cemeteries.
I grieve for those female ancestors who had very few choices in life–they never knew anything different, which is fortunate (in a warped sense).
In addition, all of the grave markers for the women express distinct chattel overtones: “wife of” and “daughter of” engravings are rampant…never remembered as autonomous individuals (horrors)!
Another (paternal) Gg-grandmother has no grave stone or marker whatsoever; and I’m having one done for her–I purchased and designed my own marker last summer; and it’s in the same lot.
Her family was not poor; and in that area of Maine, granite was dirt cheap (1919)–it was quarried in that same town, BTW
And Markos can go fuck himself; as well as self-educate (hammer Google)…no excuses in 2007.
And don’t overlook the obligation and the power we have, as parents of sons, to teach them better than we were taught…to treat girls with respect while not putting them on a pedestal…to always see their humanity along with their gender.
As someone who grew up in a houseful of girls and now the mother of 3 boys (as well as a girl) I have always tried to stress these things to my sons along with being honest in relationships, don’t go any further than she wants to, stand up for her even if it makes you unpopular with the guys, don’t laugh at or pass on sexist jokes…in fact, each time you hear one imagine it is your sister or your mother.
My daughter is beautiful and strong and self confident and I worry about her every. single. day.
Your kids are lucky to have you.
I recall defense of the “no fillibuster” Nuclear Compromise at our maincurrent blogs.
I remember Hunter saying, “no gee, I really think this means they WILL use the fillibuster” (btw, I called it correctly, that compromise was a promise never to use it… which only the naive should not have realized)…
these are the consequences.
news to people that are not really all that familiar with the laws of consequences.
It is hard for me to think of that whole period of time without the top blowing off my head.
“South Korean Cho-Seung Hui” say the headlines, as if his ethnicity were the most important thing about him.
How about “Stalker Cho-Seung Hui”, “Failed Male Supremacist Cho-Seung Hui”, or “Angry, Depressed and Disappointed in Love Cho-Seung Hui”?
The American media is so busy being racist it can’t even recognize gender issues. Questioning “traditional” notions of manliness would upset too many men who still define themselves by their control of women.
We’d be better off talking about status anxiety, and what connotes status for men and women in a society that celebrates male violence but suggests that being a “ho” is somehow empowering. Real men take what they want. Real girls are desirable commodities. There must be a lot of us angry, depressed and chafing at those expectations, and in the young, the extremes of disappointment seem to follow the very gender roles that created the problem: young men hurt somebody, and young women sell themselves cheap.
So many salient points in a few short paragraphs!
I’m so pissed, Kali, about so many things all at once.
…and don’t even get me started on the Dems “keeping their powder dry”.
Thanks for this diary. Your light cuts through the gloom.
The MSM focused on race rather than the very demeaning and dehumanizing comment that reduced these well accomplished young women to the sum of their body parts.
Imus should apologize to the other team (tennessee?) as well.
not that his apology is worth shit mind you.
Powerful poetry.
Some men are indeed destroying the world. Some men and their enablers.
Hi Kahli.
If it is necessary to use qualifiers to such a strong statement, I would prefer to phrase it thus:
Men are destroying the world, but being a human male does not make one a man.
Female and male are a sexes; woman and man are genders. The first chooses you, but you are coerced into choosing the second. One can, and indeed must, choose to be a gender/caste/race/class/etc. outlaw in order to live a just existence. Not deconstructing domination, wherever we find it, is at the very least is complicity.
Well, that will make me cry for the rest of the day.
There are men whom I love very much, a few for whom I would die.
But the poem is true, none the less.
What other group fighting for equality has had such a struggle ? We live with the enemy. We bear them in our bodies, and birth them. We bare our bodies to them, that they may replicate themselves. We sleep in their beds and we make those, too. We waste our lives being “attractive” enough so they won’t be shamed before their friends. We stoop so they can feel taller, in body, mind and spirit.
We love our enemies even better than ourselves, often because we have little choice to do otherwise. And they let us, being accustomed to that fine level of service.
Sending love to you, Susan.
Thank you, Kahli. The beauty of this space is that we know we’re not alone. This is one of the few places where sexism is treated seriously, and we bitches and hos aren’t told to STFU. The hardest battle I find is against the convenient cluelessness that locks in the status quo.
Wow keres, extraordinary poem. Filled with truth.
Hugs
But that would be a lie. There are some men who are thinkers and nurturers and caregivers – I have seen this. Gore with his outrage about the environment – a father at my granddaughter’s school who cares for his little girls and finally figured out how to cut their hair and Stephen who writes so beautifully here.
But the killers of the environment and the killers of diplomacy and the erasers of our constitution are mostly men. The women who supposedly have power (like Condi) are enablers.
I like Alex Dobkin’s quote:
It’s not all men, but it’s always men.
If we cannot speak the truth of this, we have no hope of changing it.
The more I read about all of this, the more I have to agree that it is all a part of many problems.
You have to go to the original to get the whole spirit of this speech. It was a tyrade against gays, birth control, women who wanted to work out of the home…
It was The Handmaid’s Tale in oratory. It was an effort to force women into swelling the ranks of the “Aryan” nation.
I guess I’m going to reveal my (very stylish) tinfoil hat. But I see an underlying tone of subjugation of women and an unspoken pressure to swell the numbers of “the faithful” in all of this. It’s the same spirit that the Germans fostered in the 1930s.
And I see young women who haven’t been taught that their bodies are their own. Birdwalk: There was a discussion of the Blackeyed Peas hit “My Humps” on StreetProphets. (Yeah, I know, seems odd.) But the discussion was deep. What is that song saying? Is it encouraging young women to value themselves? Or to sell themselves? I took the former position. I’ve taught way too many young women who thought their whole identity was determined by a man.
Today’s decision isn’t a stretch medically. In fact, there are a lot of options. It’s a horror from the standpoint that men are telling women what to do with their bodies, and threatening doctors who try to save their lives. It’s control–and that’s what we have to identify and shout out.
I read this at MLW, dkos, and now here.
Your back and forth in the comments with the most sycophantic of defenders was truly admirable and reveals and excellent take on reality and more importantly, the scope of blogistan wrt the so called real world.
thanks again.
Bob Herbert’s editorial in the NYT today (behind firewall), contains this reference.
Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.
I guess many of us “knew” this even without the research.
Great post, Kahli.
Thanks.
Thank you for this diary Kali. There are days(throughout my whole life actually)where I simply have to stop and give myself a little pep talk about men or I just may have turned into a permanent male hater across the board. Do all women feel this way? I think so unless they happen be in the ranks of women who themselves are helpers who enable male dominance, are homophobic and sick themselves…who have let the culture/their religion make them believe they are lesser beings.
I know I’ve had days where the oppressiveness day in and out of things big and small that make women lesser citizens, lesser humans makes me feel like I can’t breathe because of this institutionalized oppression..we have not come that long a way baby.
Given the visibility of the whole Imus thing, Kos, rap music, Supreme Court ruling and so on I’m feeling pretty breathless today-that’s part rage, part oppression and part feeling of futility that things just may never get better.
Yes. I know how you are feeling. It does seem overwhelming sometime.
The comments on this thread give me some hope. So many strong and eloquent women and supportive men.
We all need to step back when it is overwhelming. Then we have no choice but to step back into the fray.
Hugs.
Yo Kahli.
Can I get your support?
This sounds like a great idea. I’m not sure how I missed it. I do have some questions — especially about the techie side of it. Can I send you an email at the address where you are accepting submissions?
Thank you for taking a stand…this is the type of thang which needs to happen (and I can’t think of a more appropriate venue than cyberspace)!
Maine Women Authors & Progresive Politics says “Yup”.
Those of you upthread who pointed to misogyny as the underlying lynchpin (pun intended) are correct.
The I-Mess was firstly about misogyny (a pattern of it over decades); with an overlay of racism.
Any Second Waver feminist knows this…and I was screaming profanities @Sharpton when he initially was calling the race card on TV.
Nada…the misogyny trumps (as it has w/all misogynistic topics on this thread).
A note of caution on April 28th: do NOT cross-post to Kos; as that only earns him more advertising revenue.
He benefits too damned much w/toxic misogynistic threads…post & comment in threads with care, folks.
Thanks.
He’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars off the backs of women…that shit’s gotta STOP (and for more than one day).