The oppressed majority - Part 3

So what if women are treated like vessels and chattel? As unfortunate pawns in brutal wars or simply less favored by God then men?

Despite the fact that prejudice towards women may be cultural rather than religious in origin, what Hebrew mythological concepts did was codify the subservient status of women. Leviticus (Here, my moderate Christian friends are going "not goddamned Leviticus again! I wish they'd never published that book!") makes it very clear that women are chattel: owned by their fathers and passed on to their subsidiary owners - husbands. 

"Yeah but we're past that already" I hear my friends saying. "Nobody really buys that shit any more." 

You know, "love, honor and obey" was a standard part of wedding vows until the early seventies. 

And then there's this.

Imagine the rape of a man being used to advertise the advantages of a new kind of zipper.

Now, please don't get me wrong. Many people choose and derive terrific gratification from the gender roles traditionally assigned to women. I get that the role of nurturer is a valued role and not something to be considered secondary to the "real work" of the competitive labor market. I understand that people inhabit the roles that they choose with great vigor and may not consider themselves to be oppressed at all. 

I have no argument with anyone who chooses and executes any role they desire amongst the people and in the places of their choosing. My issue is not so much with the idea of gender roles as it is with the inequality of status of between between genders. 

American social conservatives very much cherish the concept of the strong father, the stern arbiter of justice and a just deliverer of the wages of sin. Many women chose roles within this construct, and again. I have no problem with that choice. I am fairly curious about it. I cannot understand it. But I accept that it is a choice one is free to make.

The problem is that these ideas are put forward not just for the women who chose that role. They are seen as the ideal relationship between men and women. Women are, according to folks like James Dobson, head of the conservative money machine Focus on the Family, biologically and psychologically constructed to be subservient to men.

What is the investment in this? I confess that it truly baffles me. Why are men so afraid of women? What is it that will happen if women are accepted as full joint partners in all of the happenings of the world?

What does it do to the American family if Dad abandons the rudder and just rows like everybody else? If Mom has no role in the family other than that she choses? If all tasks, chores and roles are negotiated and based on skill sets and interests?

But in any case the people we are talking about have made choices that are generally honored among their peers (because they chose honored roles, or because they enclave with others in similar roles). This is the middle class status quo in the world community. But these are people for whom the prospect of rape does not loom around every corner and who are not surrounded every day by the ravages of slavery, murder and mutilation.

Which is why any approach to ending inhumane and egregious treatment of women -- as well as wage inequality and other discreet categories of status where women are regarded as less valuable than men -- must use the ending of violence against women as the primary focus of intervention across organizations and across cultures. 

We here in comfortable America take on our causes like pets and they become part of us, part of our vanity. But we can no longer afford the level of specificity in non-governmental organization activity that we now have. There is literally a fund, foundation or non profit organization for everything. Every injury, disease or disability category; every cause, issue or concern; everything that ain't right but should be.

Nowadays people do private fundraising for individual children. Such is the level of detail we now address through organized giving.

And much of it goes to waste. And I am not even talking about administrative overhead. I am talking about the fact that many things that are funded provide some relief but they do not make meaningful change unless the oppression and violence against women is addressed. In most cases the efforts of this charity is adopted by the community and suffused with its values - i.e. that women are secondary. Important nonetheless, but secondary.

So long as women are subject to murder, rape, mutilation and abuse  because men and the global society we have built consider women something to be owned and controlled, we will never be able to effectively address human rights.

Part 4: What is to be done?