Category: Gender

The abortion rights debate looks different for people old enough to remember the days of back alley abortions.

Case in point: the other day my my father brought up American politics, since he’s knows it’s my job to follow it (and since we don’t much agree on Canadian politics.) He’s a conservative guy, votes for the Conservative party routinely, likes to call himself “the last Victorian” though he really isn’t. Still, he’s no liberal and he’s pushing 80.

I filled him in on Sarah Palin, in particular, and mentioned she was against all abortion except if the mother’s life is at risk.

His voice turned incredulous and he said, “Don’t people remember what it was like when abortion was illegal? Women with coathangers up their….” His voice trailed off.

After a few moments he continued again, now angry. “How can these people be so stupid? Don’t they know what it was like? All the women who died?”

All I could really say was this: “People don’t learn from other people’s mistakes. Only their own. The generation that remembers what it was like, your generation, is mostly gone. The younger folks, they don’t remember, they don’t know. They don’t understand how bad it was, how many women died, how horrible it was. They weren’t there, and for some reason they won’t listen to those few who were. Those who remember. Those who know.”

The thing that saddens me the most about humanity, that worries me the most, is this shocking inability to understand anything unless they’ve experienced it themself. Wisdom is learning from other people’s mistakes.

It seems like every good thing that was done by older generations is being undone, step by step, by fools who weren’t there, don’t remember, and can’t learn. They stripped the protections meant to stop mass bank failures and a new depression and they keep trying to make sure that women will die in droves by getting rid of the right to safe, legal abortion.

So no, Dad, they don’t remember. If people like Palin and McCain have their way, the horrors you remember from your youth will start happening again. The battles your generation fought, the victories you handed to us, your children and grandchildren, we will squander and have to earn yet again.

And if we do fail to hold onto what you gave us, a lot of women will die because of our stupidity.

(Originally posted Sept. 15th, 2008. It seems worth re-posting today.)

One Third of All Late Term Abortion Doctors Killed Today

By Ian Welsh

On May 31, 2009

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Dr. Tiller, whose Wichita clinic performed late term abortions, was shot dead in front of his church today. A lot of the focus is going to be on right wing terrorism, and the culture of hate created by folks who call abortion murder, setting up the justification for these sorts of murders.

Tiller was one of only three doctors in the US who performed these sorts of abortions. That’s not because they’re illegal, it’s because the level of physical and legal harassment they and their staffs face is horrific, and it never, ever ends. It takes a very brave man or woman, and one who has decided to dedicate their life to the cause, to put up with constant threats, vandalism, legal harassment and the very real possibility of being murdered.

Tiller was incredibly brave and dedicated to do what he did. It’s highly unlikely that anyone will step up to replace him.

A theoretical right which cannot be practically accessed is not really a right. The right to abortion, both late and early term, has been under constant assault for decades. Unless other doctors step up, and start providing for that right (and even early term abortions are hard to get in many States) then what happened today is, in fact, a tragic loss for the right for women to be able to have abortions when they need.

In the meantime, I mourn Dr. Tiller. People as brave and dedicated as he was are so rare, that, well, there were only three of them in the entire United States. A lot of women will suffer, and yes, die, because he was murdered today.

Rest in peace Doctor Tiller. Hopefully someone will pick up the torch which fell from your hand today.

One Reason Why Some Men Treat Women So Badly

By Ian Welsh

On May 1, 2009

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One my friends has been wondering why some men treat women so badly, including battery, rape and murder and seem to feel that their actions are totally justified and natural.

There’s no simple answer, I suspect, but I think one part of it is hinted at by this:

Young children think about gender in the same way they think about species of animals. They believe, for example, that a boy’s preference for football is innate, as is a girl’s preference for dolls, just as cats’ behavior is innately different from dogs’…

…The study’s findings confirm prior research, which has shown that adults and children alike think different species have deep biological differences, for example, that innate differences cause dogs to behave differently from cats. This study also found that it’s not until children are at least 10 that they treat gender and species concepts as distinct from one another, as adults do. At that age, they also understand that environment plays a role in gender-related behaviors.

I think a lot of people never really get over this. In the same way that for most of history and indeed today in many places stranger is the equivalent of alien or enemy, to many men (and women, but with less devestating effects) the other gender isn’t even really human. As such, just as with strangers in traditional societies, whatever is done to them is moral, because they aren’t even of the same species. There is no real sense of connection, of empathy shared on commonality.

The only way to break through this is usually to say “what if it were your daughter/mother/sister, but men often put those women into a special category and don’t generalize.

I should add that female contempt for men, is often palpable, and I’ve heard many women use the word man in a way that indicates they consider the entire gender beneath contempt, and men innately weak (which is amusing, because many men think the same of woman.) Of course, very few women use that contempt as an excuse for battering, raping and killing men.

Power and Gender

By Ian Welsh

On April 4, 2009

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Image by Nick in Exsilio

Many years ago I took a sociology course which really turned out to be about anthropology. Indeed the two disciplines are so close that Carleton U used to offer a 100 level course called “Introduction so SocioAnthropology” or something fairly similar to that.

Anthropologists roughly divide societies into basic groups by how they extract a living from the environment. The basic groups are hunter/gatherers, horticultural (take a stick, push it in the ground, drop a seed in), agricultural (plows) and industrial (nomads exist off to one side). What’s interesting about this is that that with very few exceptions (the Inuit are one) hunter gatherer bands are the most egalitarian societies, by far – even more egalitarian than modern industrial societies.

Agricultural societies, on the other hand, are the least egalitarian societies in general.

My Prof at the time posited the following: the more a gender contributes the more powerful they are. In typical hunter gatherer bands women account for 60% to 70% of the food – while the men are out hunting, they gather, and they gather, in fact, more food than the hunters bring in. In agricultural societies, on the other hand, men do the plowing, and women are generally relegated to the home.

But this begs an obvious question, one I immediately asked. If power is based on contribution, why aren’t hunter gatherer bands matriarchal? After all, the women are actually contributing not an equal amount of food – but much more than the men!

The answer was interesting, and I think, has a lot of truth to it. Gatherers don’t work in tight teams. Hunters, as a rule, did (remember, these guys didn’t have guns.) So the men had stronger social ties than the women.

And it is true, in general, that wherever you see women with low status, they are kept from interacting much – from forming ties with other women, or even more so, with men outside their families.

In our own society, it is striking that when things go really bad it is often with women who have become practically house bound. And it is also notable that the 50’s had women practically confined to the house.

None of this, really, should come as a surprise.

If you have the ability to produce more money, you’ll be more powerful. And who you know is one of the biggest determinants of how influential and powerful you are. Simply mentioning that you are friends with a noted lawyer, or being known to hang out with powerful people, can make you money or scare off potential predators. Not to mention give you leverage against an abusive spouse.

The housebound period then, that many modern women go through when they have their children, reduces their power both directly by reducing their earning power, and indirectly because it is often accompanied by a collapsing social circle. Likewise the tendency of many to lose friends once they become married is something to be guarded against.

The general principles, however, suggest hope for those who prefer more egalitarian societies. Because, in general information societies, should we manage to attain such, will increase the ability to maintain and extend social ties despite physical circumstances, and upper body strength will be even less necessary than it is now to earning a living. The hangover of old attitudes, the glass ceiling and so on will still be there, but there should be more cracks in that ceiling, and more power and influence to use in combating those attitudes.

Originally published at the Agonist, or maybe BopNews.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Gender

The Cost Of Forgetting Life Before Roe

One Third of All Late Term Abortion Doctors Killed Today

One Reason Why Some Men Treat Women So Badly

Power and Gender