Women as objects…
As a writer, I try to imagine what goes on in my characters’ minds, even the more violent ones. I come to conclusions at times, partly based on observation, and some can make me uncomfortable. Here’s an example: I think there’s a common thread connecting an arrogant misogynist to a serial rapist and killer. This common thread is treating women as objects.
Historically, of course, treating women as objects was the same thing as treating them as property. Our nation started with neither women nor slaves allowed to vote. For other purposes (census, taxes, and apportionment, for example), each non-indentured woman counted one unit and slaves counted three-fifths. Moving farther back in time, we find arranged marriages. At best, there was the woman and her dowry—at worst, a man’s success was measured by how many women he owned along with his cattle, sheep, or goats.
“Women have come a long way,” some say. I don’t jump on that parade float so easily. Some males in power in this country still don’t get it. They want at least to control women’s bodies, consistent with their view that those bodies are property—proposing and enacting laws about women’s reproductive rights, from birth control to abortion and redefining rape. These are the more egregious and visible actions, of course. Just as insidious is the silent discrimination in the workplace and men putting down women as a matter of habit.
I’m guilty of some of these things myself, more often in an argument where there are reasonable gender differences determining points of view. Men are too often slaves to their testosterone, a fact that makes me smile when I see the TV commercials for products designed to increase our levels. I suppose that some of our actions are evolutionary (so how do creationists weasel out of it?). Women are more compassionate and willing to give a person the benefit of the doubt, to forgive if not forget, a fact that often angers me in an argument where the person has clearly exhibited culpability.
What’s more amusing is to see a man of questionable intelligence being threatened by a woman of superior intelligence. I knew a brilliant woman in my first college years—we competed in many math courses. I never felt threatened—just admiring. She was much better than I in abstract reasoning—modern algebra and so forth. I was better in more spatial things—topology, physics, etc. I often wondered about that. I first thought it was a gender thing, the adage “women aren’t good at math” morphing into “some can beat the crap out of me in handling abstraction.”
The more people you meet, especially in different cultures, the more you realize that intellectual performance differences are very rarely a function of gender. Nevertheless, men have had their chance and then some. We haven’t done too well in ruling the world, to say the least. Maybe it’s time to let women run things, or, at least listen to their ideas. We have a long way to go to reach that state of enlightenment.
I was reminded of this reading about Ted Cruz’ Senate committee encounter with Diane Feinstein. Mr. Cruz is the junior senator from the Texas Republic, a Tea Party darling, and obviously a man who is threatened by a smart woman. He’s been in the Senate for a long time—less than a year. He dared lecture Senator Feinstein about gun control, a woman who experienced the assassination of Milk and Moscone in San Francisco. Of course, being a pompous ass jives well with his Texas and Tea Party background. The extreme right-wing of the GOP considers women to be property.
This object or property thing is a consequence of fundamentalist thinking. The SBC, for example, has been called the American Taliban, not because of their violence, but because of their way of treating women as men’s servants. I’d probably lighten up on the word Taliban, I suppose, because they don’t want a man to have more than one woman, unlike some other religions and sects, but their lack of respect for women as equal partners is legend. Why their women accept this is beyond me. I’d cut all their you-know-whats off.
The Tea Party also waves the flags of fundamentalism on more levels than just religion, of course. Senator Cruz rode this sentiment, more common in Texas than California, certainly, all the way to the U.S. Senate. He was telling Senator Feinstein between the lines that he had no respect for her or her thoughts on gun control. She reacted exactly as she should. Sometimes fools have to be put in their place. I applaud her.
Back to my original worry. Because we have such a partisan divide in this country, the common thread I mentioned at the beginning of this post has been woven into almost everything the good old boys do in Congress. There are more women than ever among our legislators and less lack of respect for their thoughts and positions. We seem to march forward one step and backward four in all our dealings with gender equality.
Recently, another august body of good old boys, the College of Cardinals, elected a new pope. Pope Francis is just a man, of course, but that’s already one strike against him. Not one cardinal is a woman. Not one priest is a woman. The Catholic Church has been trouncing on women’s rights for two thousand years, solidifying this anti-feminine position with the exclusion of the Gnostic gospels and turning the Magdalene into a common prostitute. Slander at its best, I’d say.
The Church’s attacks on women have continued right into the 21st Century, of course. Pope Benedict clamped down on American nuns. Ignoring the fancy Latin he must have used to justify his hand-slapping, he basically told the nuns to backtrack on their social work with the poor and downtrodden. Excuse me? I thought that working for the poor and downtrodden was what Christ did and wanted us to do. But I guess anti-feminism trumps social activism in the Universal Church. We’ll see how old Francis does.
To say that some women don’t want to join the conversation is not the same as saying, “Sorry, you can’t—we won’t let you.” Men are allowed choices. Why not women? Being a parish priest, for example, is a noble thing when a priest serves with compassion and feelings for his parishioners. I think a women could do this just as well as, if not better, than a man. I don’t want to participate in Congress myself, and suspect that many, men or women, feel the same way, especially in its present state, but I’d like to trumpet the fact that someone like Diane Feinstein has more to say than someone like Ted Cruz. Maybe if the good old boys would listen more to women, this world would be a much better place. Right now Mr. Cruz and his ilk just look like testosterone addicts.
And so it goes…
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