the relevance of women

[rm]

baldanders brings us the following quote:

"Women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."
- Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst, on NBC's "Meet The Press", 8/21.

If you want the context, which makes it vaguely less repellant a statement, links to that appear here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/baldanders/211184.html

It is quotes like this that both made me feel some measure of gratitude to live in the society I do, but also make me rage that I should have to be grateful for what is a half-assed approximation of what is my due as a human being. That I should then have to justify my unattractive, and therefore commonly regarded as offensive, anger as a class of person easily described as "troubling afterthought" is just another subtle - and sadly enough, trivial - indignity.

There is a line in my play, "I don't seem upset, because I'm always upset." I'm not as polite as the women I write.

Back in the BBS that shall not be named days, we all got into some thrash about women's rights or rape or something, I can't recall. And I responded in this incredibly obnoxious way, which was to start posting "chick news" over and over on the main forum (this later became a feature of a women's mailing list I ran for a time, but this was in the co-ed environment) just to demonostrate how many random news stories about women seemed to be about either their victimization or more absurdly, critiquing their feminity in the face of their accomplishments. It enraged people, in part because it sort of clogged up the message board, but I think also because it was both so agressive and so banal no one could think of a proper response to it, other than the usual round of aspersions cast.

Comments

[random-girl.livejournal.com]

Every time I interview eventually someone asks me how I got got from a college degree in psychology into computers. The story always begins with sexual discrimination; its why I left a career in marketing and went into the tech industry. See, the place where I'd clawed my way actually into marketing told me that there would never be a woman manager there. At 22, I took that to heart and left to go someplace that would hire a woman manager. I eventually found it. There's another part of the story, if people ask (and people did yesterday) about difficult people to work with. One of them was a guy who really, truly, felt that I should be barefoot, pregnant, and silent. It gave me no end of joy to antagonize him by walking the office barefoot, not pregnant, and extremely mouthy. I was, btw, a manager there, and I used the full frontal assault of my authority to make sure he didn't abuse my subordinates and my personal abuse was kept to a minimum.

I know a lot of women walk around feeling like they're equal to men, and that everyone feels that they are. I know that I feel equal to men. In fact, I've known a ton of men I've felt more than equal towards. But I can't escape the fact that everyone doesn't feel that way. That, as much as people my age would love it (and girls younger than me), we are/have/will be still touched by discrimination. Maintaining our rights to work, to work jobs we want to work in, and to have a pleasant environment (don't get me started on the Angry Canadian and his damndable desire to make a hostile work environment through sexual innuendo and attempted predation) in which to work is an ongoing fight.

It annoys the shit out of me when people say things like the quote you used. Even in this country, it's hard work. How much harder can it be in a place struggling through violence for democracy (or whatever they can agree is democracy)?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Definitely twisted and bizarre. No one could say the same thing about black people or other racial minorities to the press and not know that they were risking their career. Of course, that fact is particularly odd, given that the status women in the US today (while definitely very far from ideal) is measurably better than the (truly wretched) status of African Americans.

Attitudes about gender remain baffling and exceptionally screwed up, and as the above statement so aptly demonstrates, Republicans remain evil.