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

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 When Virginia finally -actually- repealed their law, the reports were saying something like 50,000 total across the country for all categories.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