The Great Right Wing Attack on Feminism

Right wing sites and their followers on social media love bashing feminism. The usual tactic is to highlight some extreme action or statement as if it is all feminism is about. Sometimes this is made up or something more reasonable is taken out of context – but any movement has adherents who take things to an extreme. If you take those extreme events – whether imaginary, exaggerated or real – as representing an entire movement then it says more about you than it says about feminism.

What has feminism achieved? Here’s a short list of what it was like to live in a pre-feminist world:

• women could not vote
• women were paid a significantly lower wage for the same work and often did not have the same benefits (such as employer-sponsored retirement fund)
• women could lose their job just for getting married
• control over reproduction was considered wrong; a woman was supposed to make babies whether she wanted to or not
• victims of rape were considered at least partly responsible
• if women could get maternity leave at all, there was no matching paternity leave, meaning that they took the sole career cost of having a family
• women were not considered suited to management jobs
• women could not aspire to any professions out of the limited pool of teaching and nursing
• women were not expected to take credit for scientific discovery even if they played a pivotal role (Marie Curie shattered that barrier by winning two Nobels in different sciences)

You could argue that some of this could have been achieved without feminism. But if you look for the opposite kind of society that has not only failed to develop feminism but retains a dogmatic pre-modern patriarchal outlook, very few of the above have occurred.

Try Saudi Arabia, for example, where women are not allowed to drive and are not even allowed out of the house if they may encounter unknown adult males without a male relative chaperone (a mahram:a young child will do). In practice, this is not strictly enforced in situations like shopping but a Saudi woman may not be examined by a male doctor, for example, with a mahram companion. I asked a Muslim work colleague about this and he explained that the Quran requires that a women have male company in a situation of danger – as a practical guideline because men are on average stronger – and the ludicrous implication of the Saudi law is that their society is unsafe in ordinary day-to-day situations.

Afghanistan, despite the overthrow of the Taliban, remains a deeply misogynistic society, as do the tribal regions of Pakistan, with horrendous practices like “honour” murders.

Even more so: regions under control of ISIS.

Generally speaking biggest the enemy of feminism is literalist, patriarchal interpretation of religion.

And that also is found in Western society in the form of movements like the Tea Party (which fortunately is constrained by a robust constitution that they clearly would like to tear up).

So do we still need feminism – aren’t the achievements I listed enough? As long as we still have patriarchal and misogynist attitudes in society we need a movement to counter that. As one example, the mentality that a rape victim “asked for it” or at very least ought to be ashamed still persists. Why, if that is not the case, is a rape victim entitled to anonymity?

If you get drunk and fall asleep without closing your front door and wake up to find your house emptied by thieves, does society expect you to be so ashamed that your identity should be concealed? Even if you did something stupid that left you vulnerable, no one has to take advantage of that. In fact you could argue that a crime taking advantage of vulnerability is worse than taking on someone able to defend themselves.

So: yes, feminism is still relevant and there is still work to be done. And no: I do not support ludicrous interpretations of feminism, even if those interpretations are real and not the product of the fevered imagination of rabid right wingers.

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Update: Some right wingers may argue that feminisms past achievements are good but – job done – we can stop the whole movement now. However the right side of politics bitterly opposed all these advances at the time and it is unreasonable to suppose that they would not attempt to backslide if the pressure let up.

Republicans Go To Hell

Something that no longer astounds me is the way people claiming extreme religious devotion are capable of unspeakable acts of barbarism. I grew up with a church-going mother who really believed the bits about good works, etc., and would never relate to this sort of behaviour.

In the latest example, Republican Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin has caused widespread offence and even a little dismay in his own camp by claiming that “legitimate rape” victims can’t get pregnant, echoing a superstition long debunked by medical science that you can only get pregnant if you enjoy it.

He’s subsequently issued a non-apology (I used the wrong words) and refused to withdraw (ironically the only form of contraception his end of the loony bin recognizes) from the race. Other Republicans have urged him to withdraw (that word again), without specifying exactly what he said wrong.

The problem is, they don’t want to say, because they want the votes women haters represent.

Women’s groups have been rallying to support Akin’s Democrat opponent Claire McCaskill, as they should – and I hope not only women but also men and others who have less bizarre takes on religion work hard to stop him too. I know my mother would have.

I wonder how soon we’ll see a PAC formed by Rapists for Republicans. If his views ever became enshrined in law, all a rapist would need to do to escape conviction (in line with 13th-century British law) is to ensure the victim became pregnant, thereby enabling the “she must have enjoyed it” defence.

If anyone cannot see how unspeakably barbaric these views are, tell us your secret. How did you manage to live to be 800 years old?

I should also add here that though this is very much a Republican disease – the “religious right” has become something of a tapeworm in the brain of the Republicans – there are plenty of Democrats on the wrong side of women’s issues. But the Republican position has become so extreme that I focus on them specifically.

The US right has a long and repulsive tradition of denial of rationality, including tobacco denial, ozone hole denial and climate change denial. If there’s evidence for something, that doesn’t count, if it contradicts you beliefs. It’s sad that this sort of thing has become mainstream in a country that could land astronauts on the moon and bring them back safely, and pushes the boundaries of science in so many areas.

The root cause of this sort of lunatic view is a deeply anti-rationalist view of the world that says you literally believe what you are told by your religion, even if it’s contradicted by obvious, verifiable evidence. The thing that’s behind that is the bizarre view that there is a supreme creator of the universe, who is infinitely wise and powerful, and has the ego of a spoilt toddler, who smashes everything if he doesn’t get his way. If you think about this for only a second, why would someone that wise and powerful care a jot what I think of her? This representation of the creator serves one and only one purpose: the personal agenda of the religious hierarchy. Create extremes of afterlife – a wonderful paradise versus an extreme of barbaric punishment in hell – and a set or rules that must be followed to get to the right place, and you have a wonderful control tool for the gullible.

Don’t get me wrong: I know some very religious people who are wonderful, and do not fit the characterisation here. The point is that there is a huge self-interest for the megalomaniac to twist this sort of belief system to advantage. And look at what they’ve done:

• politicians who all but justify rape because they have a pathological objection to abortion
• suicide bombers who have no scruples about killing dozens or even thousands in the most barbaric fashion
• Zionist zealots who cannot see that the Palestinians may have some sort of case

I would personally rather believe that there is no supreme creator being and be totally responsible for my own actions. If I’m wrong, a being powerful enough to create a whole universe is unlikely to be so capricious as to punish an honest mistake. On the other hand, such a being is certainly not going to take lightly being held responsible for all manner of barbarism for such a feeble reason as “I thought I was meant to take everything literally, especially if I could read it as excusing extremes of cruelty and treating my fellow humans as worthless.”

One reason though I really would like there to be a hell is so I could see the faces of the Republican women haters, suicide bombers, apartheid politicians, Zionist zealots and others who used their creator’s name to excuse unspeakable barbarity at the point when they realise their mistake. To echo a line from The Simpsons: “See you in hell. From heaven.”

And since we are ending with comedy, here’s a starting point for the new Republican approach to trying rapists:

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Update

In case you think this is a random outlier, here's another one (not the actual candidate speaking but a pretty convincing take-down of Indiana Republican senate candidate Richard Mourdock's position that a woman gets pregnant from a rape because “it is something God intended to happen”):

Like Akin, he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about, and claims his words have been taken out of context. Then there’s the tea party Tennessee Republican congressman Scott DesJarlais who was recorded making a phone call to his mistress urging her to have an abortion. To add insult to injury, he's a doctor, so he's facing an ethics enquiry.

Small government, it seems, is one small enough to get into your bedroom. But not if you’re a Republican. Maybe they have smaller bedrooms.

You can’t make this stuff up. I write novels in my spare time, and I certainly wouldn’t.

Why the Right is Wrong

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. In Australia, we had Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, and it was pretty much the same thing. A general angst was verbalised in populist right wing terms, and swept up a lot of people who didn’t really agree with the sort of extremism that goes with this sort of viewpoint  – and a good number who thought if you prefaced a racist view point with “I’m not a racist but” it was somehow OK.

This sort of rabid populism is usually founded on well-placed fears and concerns, but turns on soft targets: the most disadvantaged sectors of society who can’t fight back. In Australia, it’s asylum seekers. In Europe, it’s immigrants. In the US, it’s loopy theories about who Barack Obama really is.

None of this of course targets the real cause of whatever crisis justifies the underlying fears. In Australia, asylum seekers are a tiny fraction of migrants, and real illegal immigrants like backpackers working without permission are a much bigger factor in “stealing” jobs from low-paid workers. Globalisation, and Australia’s insistence on lifting trade barriers no other developed country lifts, is an even bigger factor. Australia for example has the least protected agriculture outside a country managed by the IMF. In the US, much of the current economic crisis was caused by aggressive deregulation of banking under previous popular presidents, including Regan and Clinton (the latter more a creature of the right than his backers admit).

This kind of emotional populist politics is very easy of course. You find your victims, you point them at someone powerless and let rip with sound bites. It’s tough stuff to combat. When I saw Obama trying to explain that “Yes we can” means “Yes we can but not instantly” it was painful to watch – yet he was right. The damage of decades of economically loopy policies cannot be undone overnight.

Worse still, now the Republicans have a hold on Congress and are running scared of their own extremist right – those that aren’t in that category themselves – they will have the momentum to stop other critical reforms, like cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Visit this site every now and then and check the trend of the oil price in the sidebar if you want comfort in delusion. I just wonder when the right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute and miscellaneous fossil fuel interests that fund them and some of the uglier right wing politics are going to find that running off a cliff isn’t the best choice, even if it’s your cliff.

But meanwhile politics of the populist right protects the real villains from exposure – and makes innocent victims suffer.