Hmm

[deathpixie]

Funny how things travel in coincidences. Not a couple of days after a conversation with a friend about the way women are viewed as manipulative and somehow evil, Joss Whedon shares his thoughts.

I'm not entirely sure of the Womb Envy theory - my presonal theory is that it's a function of fear, of men in general (not any one specific man or group of men) being afraid of the impact women have on them, on their behaviour and the control they can weild through sex that leads to the 'evil' tag, but again, that's just a vague opinion and nothing to do with any of the actual men I know (with a couple of exceptions). It's something to think about, any way, the fact that 50% of the population is not only targeted as weak and morally reprehensible, but that that 50% also buys into it.

The article also raises for me the question of the power of the modern media in our society, and whether, with the glut of reality TV, we've become so used to viewing things as part of a giant television show or movie or game, that we don't stop to considering the actual reality of it. The empathy of it.

Heavy thinking before heading off for the traditional May 2-4 BBQ, this time at Johnny's place where we don't have to get caught in the rain. I'll leave you to it.

Comments

[resplendissante.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[frito-kal.livejournal.com]

100,000? Good god. When Virginia finally -actually- repealed their law, the reports were saying something like 50,000 total across the country for all categories.

That number keeps going up, and I wonder how many unreported cases there still are, if 65,000 was the number that was reported start-to-finish. (That's the number wikipedia's currently giving here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_sterilization)

[resplendissante.livejournal.com]

I honestly can't remember what the number was adjusted for - I think it might have been all of North America, or else it was to include the statistically-probable number of unreported cases. I took that class more than a year ago, so the article is somewhere on my hard drive, but I'm sure you can stand to live without the citation.

But yeah, it's ridiculously high. And while others were sterilized against their will, it was pretty gender-specific to do the procedures without anaesthetic (this was a lesson in what happens if you get pregnant, apparently). Andrea Smith wrote about native women specifically in Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide - I didn't agree with a lot of her conclusions ("All women of colour are oppressed equally but white women are evil" was one of the more, um, interesting little tangents), but she has some truly chilling background research on native reproduction and how it was controlled by the government. Like how they were forced to take dangerous longterm birth control.

So yeah, I agree with Joss Whedon that reproduction plays a huge role in what roles women take, both in society and in fiction. I'm not sure if it all boils down to "womb envy", but it's an area that can stand to be problematized. And it does tie in to violence, quite a bit, I think.

[frito-kal.livejournal.com]

It might've been all of North America - looking at the wiki stuff, that seems about right. Either way, it's an absurdly large number of people sterlized without consent and it's gone up at least twice that I know of, because of adjusting for more cases being discovered/reported.

There was a study done - I'll have to see if I can find it, talking about how there is a sharp increase in violence against women when they are pregnant. I think it was specifically domestic/family, but I am not entirely sure. My TKD teacher's wife was talking about it when one of our blackbelts was expecting.

[amythyst7.livejournal.com]

It's specifically regarding domestic violence, afaik. A woman who has suffered domestic violence is more likely to be killed or severely injured at two points - when she leaves her abuser or when pregnant.

[deathpixie]

*nods* It's something we saw in Australia too, with the Aboriginal population. There was an actual policy - "Breed Out The Colour". Aboriginal women were 'given' to white men in order to produce half-breed children, who would then be given to white men to produce further degrees of part-Aboriginal children, and so on. The intention was to overwhelm the 'weak' Aboriginal genes with our superior white ones. This was accompanied by the usual removal of part-Aboriginal children from their families, to be raised in orphanages and trained as domestic servants and farm hands, in order to further separate them from a 'dying' culture.

Child removal was going on up unti 1970. That just boggles me. There's a film - Rabbit Proof Fence - that really illustrates how things were, and yes, gender and reproduction were a big part of how they were controlled.