Are Women Mad Enough? Or Is It All Just A Distraction?

by Christine Garvin on March 27, 2012

in Confrontations

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The men making decisions about women’s healthcare.

The war on women’s rights is unsettling and downright frightening. But are we really hearing the true views of American society?

I’ve been sitting on, and debating about, this post for the last month.

Every day, it seems to get worse. Another law forcing women to have a medically unnecessary ultrasound before they can get an abortion. Or forcing women to show an employer a prescription for birth control to prove it’s not for “reproductive purposes”. Another fat, old white man politician comparing women to cows and pigs.

There are more than a few possible angles when it comes to the current “war on women”. From patriarchy rearing its malformed head due to the rise in numbers of educated women as compared to men on over to the extreme religious right spotting their chance to grab hold of the political establishment.

It might be a final backlash of a failing system as it takes its dying breaths before something new – and much, much better – takes it place.

Power and money are most certainly at the heart of it, and conservative, religious, ‘family values’ white males – you know, the ones who most often get caught canoodling with a female prostitute in Florida or bent over a teenage boy in a hotel room – want not only to keep their position of wealth and prestige, but strengthen it.

Testosterone flying all over the place.

Except, I don’t actually believe that most men agree with what is happening right now. I think that most of the ones who are paying attention are just about as appalled as I am. This is particularly true if they are a person of color, but I’ll go ahead and say most white guys I know are also pissed. Given, I don’t hang out with a lot of conservative, religious, ‘family values’ guys, but sometimes, I think this persona only exists in our government and on Fox News in order to distract us from everything else that they are sneakily doing.

Screaming Idiots

Keep 'em quiet. / Photo: Kheel Center, Cornell University

Don’t get me wrong – whatever reason or reasons they are deciding to literally make women second class citizens and have governmental reach over our bodies while they spew ridiculousness about “less government” (which at the moment, means they say Obamacare is forcing us to buy health insurance and that isn’t the government’s right. But apparently it is their right to invade my body if I choose to terminate a pregnancy for WHATEVER reason, including rape, incest, or that carrying a baby to term is a threat to my life. Or invade my health history if god forbid, I want some control over my own destiny) is not okay at all and I’m here to stand up for myself and all women – and the sane men who are along with us.

But on the other hand, it is a bunch of clutter, isn’t it? Every day, more and more clutter to distract us. More negativity to raise our blood pressure and divide us. More of the creation of a particular lens – that there are so many extreme Christians, there are so many redneck men, there are so many right-wing nuts. Maybe they are just the loudest? Maybe they are just the ones the news wants us to see?

Sometimes I wonder if Rush Limbaugh really has that many people listening to him or if they just tell us he does.

What to do?

I saw the movie Miss Representation last night (I highly recommend trying to catch a screening of it near you), and was succinctly reminded of the power of media. That so many of our beliefs about different groups – and in this case, women – are based on what we see on TV, in the movies, in magazines.

That women have been reduced to over-sexualized and/or bitchy creatures with impossibly perfect bodies that don’t really want anything out of life other than to find their Prince Charming (so go buy all these products to become Ms. Perfection).

That shit’s ridiculous to live up to. And yet most women, knowingly or unknowingly, try and live up to it everyday.

Can the media affect the way we see the world if we aren’t watching?

Same goes for this media spin on women. It does impact they way we see each other, what we believe others are thinking, what wars we need to fight. But what if we took our attention away from the screaming pundits? Would they continue to have power?

Can the media affect the way we see the world if we aren’t watching?

I know it’s not that simple. I know we have to know what is going on in order to make change, vote for the lesser of the two evils, to connect to others who are disenfranchised. But it may be time to make a concerted effort to minimize what we take in, and maximize the good we put out.

I recognize that I have thrown myself head-first into the fray about women’s (read: human and civil) rights over the last several weeks. That I have indeed made my blood pressure rise (which is probably okay since I usually have low blood pressure). That I’ve fed into the system that disgusts me. And maybe that’s why it took me so long to write this.

Now I’m taking my energy back.

About the author

Christine Garvin is a health writer who holds an MA in Holistic Health Education and is a certified Nutrition Educator. She writes for and edits the holistic health site, Living Holistically, and co-edits Confronting Love. She spends entirely too many hours on the computer each day, but squeezes in dancing hip-hop and bhangra and doing yoga as much as possible. An avid traveler, she lives just outside of Asheville, NC where new-age-meets-Billy-Graham. Follow her on Twitter @livingwholesoul or on her FB page.

  • http://tradingplacesglobal.wordpress.com/ Shelley Seale

    “It might be a final backlash of a failing system as it takes its dying breaths before something new – and much, much better – takes it place.”

    I sure, sure, sure hope so. That possible idea at least gives me hope. Love this post.

  • http://holisticwithhumor.com Christine Garvin

    Thanks for your thoughts, Nikki. And thanks for sharing Yashir’s piece. I particularly liked this part:

    “While it’s important to look at the gender imbalance issue through these lenses, the most important and most often forgotten way is to see this issue through empathy. Empathy is about understanding, about being aware, about making attempts to feel what another person feels.”

    Sometimes I think this is where the true struggle lies. Are men – in general – empathetic to what women go through? Are they taught to not be empathetic as “men”, and therefore struggle to see things outside of the realm of black-and-white? Do they tune out when they feel they are being lashed? Are women being empathetic to other women? Are we taught to compete against each other rather than care about each other?

    The hard part of this fight, in my eyes, is that the backlash and misunderstanding just seems to grow, and I’m not really sure, as with racism, that we are really changing people’s minds. Fighting rarely changes people’s minds – it’s getting them to see the plight of another that does. Continuously pointing out all the things the other person does wrong does not bring them over to our side – instead, they get defensive and deeper in their convictions. Case in point – my mom is German and was born right after the end of WWII. While given the atrocities of the Nazis is never to be forgotten, she is sick and tired of Germans only being portrayed as Nazis in American media. She is appalled at the hypocritical attitude of an America that killed off the people who originally lived on this land, the enslavement and persecution of people from another land, and the massive amount of innocents who have been killed around the world by our army’s hands, or some puppet regime propped up by us. She pushes off her own guilt onto the notably horrible policy America has employed, and tries to diminish the horrors at the hands of her own countrymen, mostly due to America saying, “You Germans are the bad guys always and forever.” And so no one is right, and no one is better off.

    I’m just not sure there will ever be an end to the fight. Instead, I wonder if the answer lies in making allies. First and foremost, I think we need to make allies with each other as women. If women came together and fully supported each other, this wouldn’t even be a question. We have the most disjointed movement of all – I think the movement for gay rights has been so successful in recent years because the agenda is almost exactly the same for everyone who is a part of the movement (given, there are some discrepancies within the movement, but they aren’t cutting lines down the middle).

    Women have to start believing in WOMEN. And we have to make it so that it is a more positive thing to love and support other women rather than a “feminazi” negative thing because this does, unfortunately, turn a lot of women off to the movement. MLK brought people to the civil rights movement because of its non-violent approach. Gandhi is a similar case. If we believe real change is possible in the world, then we must live it.

    Given, I don’t have all the answers. How to we eliminate all the abuse and oppression of women around the world? Somehow, I believe, we have to get to the women. We have to get to the woman who runs a brothel in India because she was enslaved as a child and now she enslaves girls in return. We have to get to the women who perform female circumcision in Africa. We have to get to conservative white Christian women in America who believe it is their duty to submit to the men.

    Until then, we can forget about changing men’s minds on the whole.

  • http://womenarefrommars.wordpress.com/ NikkiB

    Thanks for responding – sorry it took me a bit to get back!

    I agree that the point on empathy is HUGE. I also agree that I’d so much rather this didn’t feel like a fight – and I was far, far more adverse to that kind of language prior to all this with contraception and women’s right and Zimmerman still being free. THAT kind of thing, when things are this bad, is when it starts to feel like a fight. But, even then, the “battle” is against this political forces, not against the people right here – whether that is in my town on in my blogging circle. At that point, I agree we need to think about reaching out, making distinctions between hurtful acts and people as individuals so we do less attacking, more talking.

    Of course, I feel that’s a fine line to walk. Women have been told for.ev.er. that we aren’t supposed to get angry – and our society has trouble with female anger (“is it that time of the month?”). It has trouble with black anger (just scary). It has trouble with queer anger (“stop being such a queen”). Therefore, even while we walk the line where we work to change hearts and minds through compassion, we also must be careful not to hide our righteous anger simply because we’re supposed to and it makes everyone else more comfortable.

    But, yes, the bottom line still remains. We need to be better at finding compassion, empathy, and believing in one another. Helping one another and reaching out. I believe this can happen not only among women, but across movements – connecting across not only gender but race, class, religion, sexuality, etc. We all want the same thing: equality, and a world where diversity is celebrated, not “accepted”.

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