{"id":2451,"date":"2012-03-14T09:12:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T13:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2451"},"modified":"2012-03-14T09:12:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T13:12:50","slug":"the-war-on-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2451","title":{"rendered":"The War on Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spent a lot of yesterday reading At the Root of this Longing; reconciling a spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst<\/em><\/a>, by Carol Lee Flinders.\u00a0 Horrified by being reminded of one mechanism that keeps patriarchy in place: that sociopaths kill women and girls they don\u2019t even know.\u00a0 They are a kind of \u201cpolice function\u201d that keeps the rest of us women \u201cin our place\u201d, keeps us from feeling safe in a strange place at night.\u00a0 We\u2019re seeing this more openly than usual in the Republican War on Women.\u00a0 Women who dare to speak out, take charge of their own sexual lives, protest the ongoing war, speak up for children…\u00a0 are being insulted and marginalized by presidential candidates.\u00a0 Furthermore, it\u2019s the idea that women and the earth are not sacred and to be respected that allows us to destroy the natural environment.
\nFlinders quotes \u201ca traditional Sanscrit teaching …\u00a0\u00a0 That is a well-governed state where women, adorned with all dress and ornaments, unaccompanied by men, can move freely and fearlessly in its roads and lanes.\u201d (p196)\u00a0 (from the Epilogue to the Great Indian Saga, the Mahabharata.)\u00a0 By this standard, it\u2019s been a very long time, perhaps several millennia, since any of the countries in Europe could be called \u201cwell-governed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Flinders started writing At the Root of this Longing<\/em>, a young girl in her community was kidnapped, raped and murdered.\u00a0 As a result, both she and her husband, who was teaching fifth grade in the same community, struggled with outrage and grief. Tim Flinders, looking at his students, suddenly had the horrifying thought that the victim could have been one of his students.\u00a0 Then he had the even more horrifying realization that the murderer could have been one of his own too.\u00a0 \u201cAs a teacher, he knew firsthand that \u2018Richard Allen Davis is sitting right now in fifth-grade classrooms all across the country, alienated, abused, angry, helpless, with little sense of right and wrong, and with nothing to lose.\u2019\u201d (p213)
\nHe goes on to say that Davis was not the very unusual case we would like to believe.\u00a0 \u201cHe is part of a male culture … that bolstered his feelings, however bent they might have been, however distorted or self-serving or even irrational.\u00a0 At the center of that culture, driving it, is the understanding that sex is domination and that women want it to be.\u00a0 And whenever any man tells a lurid joke or rents a pornographic video or brags about last night\u2019s conquest, we\u2019ve done our little bit to perpetuate it.\u201d\u00a0 (p214)<\/p>\n

Carol Flinders also quotes Mike Messner, a sociologist, who believes that boys and young men learn a \u201csexual script\u201d that starts with \u201cobjectification of a woman,\u201d reducing her to \u201ca manipulated object.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cImportantly, the sexual act is most erotically salient for the young man in terms of his status vis-\u00e1-vis his male peers \u2014 not in relation to his actual sexual partner.\u00a0 Though she is physically present, the girl or woman, as a thinking, choosing partner, is obliterated.\u201d\u00a0 Flinders p215.\u00a0 She gives the reference: Michael Messner and Donald Sabo, Sex\u00a0 Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity<\/em> (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1994)<\/a> p67.
\nTo me this sounds a lot like the psychological mechanism that allowed the Nazis to de-humanize the Jews, that allows all the so-called \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d that has gone on, including the United States driving the Cherokee out of their ancient homeland.\u00a0 It also sounds like a lot of the Republican candidates for government, or already in government, have been trained in the same \u201csexual script.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spent a lot of yesterday reading At the Root of this Longing; reconciling a spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst, by Carol Lee Flinders.\u00a0 Horrified by being reminded of one mechanism that keeps patriarchy in place: that sociopaths kill women … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11,14,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-present-day","category-spirit","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}