The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
While of course anyone can (and I'm sure will) comment, I want to offer the following thoughts and concerns mainly to the other PF women... @Chloe, @Dr. Who, @AeonPax, @Adelaide, @silvereyes, and @Abby08...but also to those men who I think might be open-minded enough to listen and consider what I'm about to say without recourse to sheer pettiness: @Green Arrow, @Safety, and @kilgram in particular. Anyway...
We hear a lot about "witch hunts" these days; since the days of Nixon especially, mostly from very powerful men who are somewhat desperate to cover up real crimes. Personally, I don't feel that it is ever acceptable for men to appropriate histories of specifically female victimhood, as though they are suffering comparably. That said though, I'd like to point out that there is a sense in which witch hunts really are relevant to our current situation as a nation.
Once upon a time, there was a myth subsequently labeled diabolism in which the general population of Europe believed. Diabolism held that women had sex with Satan in order to acquire supernatural powers and that any deviation from harshly repressive gender roles on a woman's part (such as: being in public without a male escort, talking to other women, owning a business, etc.) was evidence of one's subservience to the devil. This fictional vice was known as witchcraft. Any woman could be a "witch", in truth. Just one excerpt from the Malleus Maleficarum -- the Catholic Church's principal treatise on witchcraft -- suffices to establish this fact:
"All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman… What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours… When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil… Women are by nature instruments of Satan — they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation."
A woman was hence suspect automatically and proven guilty by the testimony of others that one had rejected male authority in some way. Such testimony was typically extracted from one's daughter or daughters under threat of official violence, whereupon they would be forced to watch their mother's execution from the front row. And there were a thousand other ways as well in which a woman might have been persecuted under this regime, such as being made to wear a bridle for speaking out of turn to a man. (You'll forgive me for feeling that Donald Trump's plight is not actually similar despite his claims.) Eventually, women no longer generally had to be forced to avoid communication with other women, etc. etc., as these oppressions gradually became internalized and viewed as the natural order of things, so women increasingly submitted to them voluntarily after enough generations of training and brainwashing.
"So what", you ask? "How is that relevant to us today?" What's relevant about that today is how this particularly egregious and extreme form of organized misogyny began, which Natasha Chart of Feminist Current aptly sums up this way:
It began with economics, in other words: with the launch of movements that had the purpose of terminating female participation in the formal economy.Eventually, the church’s client states had a problem keeping their peasants in line, because the church and the aristocracy wanted to steal all the land and privatize it for themselves through enclosure of the commons.
As Sylvia Federici explains in her book, Caliban and the Witch, secular authorities eventually hit on the popular strategy of giving everything that women had to men, including the women themselves. Civil servants didn’t forget to account for the economic value of women’s work; rather, it was explicitly written out of economic accounting — declared to have no value during the enclosure era. Male tradesmen coordinated boycotts of female competitors and of men who worked with them. Women who persisted in trying to engage in public trades were harassed, called “$#@!s” or “witches,” or were even assaulted without repercussion.
...
In order to do their part in solving the problem of the revolting peasantry and acquire their own share of the former commons, the church stepped up to bless this destruction of women’s rights and independence with the seal of divine approval. Their priests invented witches. ...
Last Saturday (August 12th), as we know, hundreds of white nationalists (or "fine people", as our president alternatively describes them) carrying giant swastika flags, wearing Confederate insignia, and brandishing would-be Crusader shields (to say nothing of plentiful guns) descended upon Charlottesville for the stated purpose of "showing our power" and defending monuments to various Confederate military leaders in what for such a crowd qualified as an unusually large and visible gathering. We all know how it ended. What you may not know (if you're lucky) is that those same people subsequently attempted to organize what they called a nationwide March on Google that was scheduled to take place in nine U.S. cities this weekend. It's purpose? To demand that the multinational technology giant stop hiring women on the grounds that women are biologically unfit to work in the technology field. It was part of a broader right wing defense of a former Google employee by the name of James Damore who had authored a widely circulated memo revolving around that proposal. (For example, upon his termination, said employee was offered work at WikiLeaks by Julian Assange.) The march was cancelled though after the organizers observed the level of popular opposition that they stood to face. But it almost happened! Said situation would have marked an exact logical reversal of the events of the 1960s and '70s wherein women would organize marches to demand admission to colleges and workplaces from whence they as a group were banned. It shows how far the American perspective on the rights of women has come since that era that we nearly had our first large-scale march in the modern era demanding the prohibition of women from a sector of the formal economy.
What I seek to point out here is that that's how it starts. That's how the complete and total elimination of all the rights and gains of women begins. That's how close we are to such a beginning as a culture right now. Formal witch hunts may or may not return, but general disenfranchisement and organized persecution of women simply for being female most certainly can! And we're not very far culturally from that becoming possible right here in America. Not nearly as far as you might like to think! I offer this as a wake-up call to generations of Americans, and particularly of American women, who have passively taken our rights and advances for granted, as though future progress toward equal status is inevitable and our gains and protections cannot be taken away. The danger of losing not just something, but everything, is far more real and present than you realize and the referenced political elements are its advance guard!
I swear I'm not trying to be overly dramatic or dire! I'm just trying to wake people up.
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Originally Posted by Safety
