"Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another."
-H. L. Mencken
I speak this morning more as a convert than one who's had the direct, lifelong experience of misogyny. I feel compelled to speak on this topic of which I know nothing as I scroll through the news and see a pattern that no one seems to be talking about.
At the U.N. this week, protesters forced the body to address the appalling stories of rape and torture on October 7th. Women's bodies naked from the waist down, mutilated, pelvises broken by what happened that horrible day.
No one seems to care. Instead, we worry about the 15,000 mostly women and children who've died in Israel's brutal retribution. As well we should; however, the common thread here is that these Palestinian men engaged in mass sexual assault, and then crouched behind their own women as human shields. It is simply beyond the pale.
The Arab world, from what I saw of it, is a hell hole for women. A woman driving a car may find herself run off the road. Showing elbows or wearing her hair down may draw the attention of a religious policeman, always a man, with the ability to inflict corporal punishment then and there. A public spanking, basically. Men using the power of religion to dominate and control a majority of their family members and neighbors.
But wait. I could've been talking about the United States right there. In our emerging theocracy and its emerging body of reactionary jurisprudence on a broad spectrum of civil rights, no group has lost more than women it seems. The Dobbs decision opened the door for gerrymandered state governments in the thrall of the religious right to regulate women's bodies like public property. The abortion bans often were already in place, and became effectively immediately and automatically once Dobbs was released. Others were passed as acts of political theater (I'm looking at you, Florida) to cynically advance the political careers of the right's most craven panderers.
So in Texas a woman seeks an injunction against that benighted state's abortion ban because carrying her nonviable fetus to term will likely preclude her ever having another child.
Th puzzler here is how this keeps happening, all over the planet. I mean, we're talking about over 51% of the population of the U.S., and just under 50% of the human race (disease and death in chilbirth are still a thing in the developing world, I guess).
In our country, it seems that the progressive side of the house has moved on to more divisive issues like defending the rights of drag queens to read to kindergarten classes. They haven't minded their knitting, and here we are.
But more broadly, this rolling back of women's rights has required the cooperation and complicity of a swath of women themselves. "He can grab my p*ssy anytime", their t-shirts proclaim at Trump rallies, referring to the Orange Jesus's candid admission of serial sexual assault. And with a few exceptions, our religious insituttions across the globe have not only been complicit, but have actively fought to keep women as chattel.
When I despair a bit about all this, P reminds me of how much this country has improved since the days of serial sexual harrasment and sometimes outright assault, when women stood silent for fear of losing their livelihoods, and were outright threatened with such if they ever came forward to tell the truth about their lives. Those things still happen, sadly, but it seems less endemic in this country than back then. There's a reason P didn't laugh with me when we watched Anchorman together.
And I did laugh those years ago watching the movie, because I'm sort of Paul on the road to Damascus when it comes to gender equality. I was a fighter pilot after all, part of what was then an all-guy club who'd tell you women had no place in that world and not think there was anything wrong with that. I'm still profoundly ambivalent about placing women in combat roles, mostly because of the risk of something happening like what we saw on 7 October, but at some point have come around to the conclusion that women have been in those positions of risk all along, and the ship has sailed in any event at this point.
So I'm learning. P's helped a lot, with her story of overcoming daunting obstacles to make her way professionally and as a single mother. My own Mom provided another example, clawing her way to a doctorate over decades with a husband and then ex-husband doing what he could to undermine that quest. But I still have a lot of work to do on my own perceptions.
This is where an essayist would perhaps move into prescriptive mode, suggesting what might be done about all this. I guess rather than being a pundit on a topic about which I know nothing, I'll just suggest that empowerment--financial and political--is the only time-tested way to force change. We've made great strides on that front here in the U.S. We need to help make that happen everywhere else, even as we work on repairing our own broken system.
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