I think it's more complicated than Womb Envy, but he definitely has a point that reproduction is one of the most stigmatized, controlled aspects of gender difference; no doubt there are a million different examples, but the one I always go back to is that nearly 100,000 native women were sterilized in the United States in the 1970s - that is, when they got pregnant, they were given abortions (often without anaesthetic) and then hysterectomies (both without their consent).
Controlling reproduction isn't necessarily only about gender (in the example above, it was also about race and land), but I agree with Whedon that reproductive differences do make a huge difference in how women and men are treated. Fear might have something to do with it, but I think, on a more basic level, it's about power. (This is the political scientist in me. Everything's about power. :) Making women's reproductive capabilities - and, in many ways, their actual bodies - an issue of shame (let's all turn to the story of original sin for a moment) makes it easy to argue that biological differences mean political differences: "If you can't actually hunt and gather, what makes you think you can do it metaphorically in Parliament? What you do is different, and takes place over there, where it can't hurt society."
Misogyny is also more complicated than the dichotomies in Whedon's blog entry. It's a rant for another day, but I think there are shades of difference between tainted and evil. There's a whole discourse of illness that starts to come out - a kind of pathology of femininity, where it's like a disease that can be spread. Some of my favourite parts of Buffy and Angel were the ones where they addressed that - Billy (the rescued-from-hell-then-Lilah-shot-him guy) in Angel particularly, in reverse. (Okay, I'm stopping now before my nerdisms get worse. I should really be answering my email now that I'm semi-competent to do so. :)
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Date: 2007-05-20 10:28 pm (UTC)Controlling reproduction isn't necessarily only about gender (in the example above, it was also about race and land), but I agree with Whedon that reproductive differences do make a huge difference in how women and men are treated. Fear might have something to do with it, but I think, on a more basic level, it's about power. (This is the political scientist in me. Everything's about power. :) Making women's reproductive capabilities - and, in many ways, their actual bodies - an issue of shame (let's all turn to the story of original sin for a moment) makes it easy to argue that biological differences mean political differences: "If you can't actually hunt and gather, what makes you think you can do it metaphorically in Parliament? What you do is different, and takes place over there, where it can't hurt society."
Misogyny is also more complicated than the dichotomies in Whedon's blog entry. It's a rant for another day, but I think there are shades of difference between tainted and evil. There's a whole discourse of illness that starts to come out - a kind of pathology of femininity, where it's like a disease that can be spread. Some of my favourite parts of Buffy and Angel were the ones where they addressed that - Billy (the rescued-from-hell-then-Lilah-shot-him guy) in Angel particularly, in reverse. (Okay, I'm stopping now before my nerdisms get worse. I should really be answering my email now that I'm semi-competent to do so. :)