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The 16 Percenters
Having come of age with the women's movement, I'll admit that I felt for many years that change was coming fast and was inevitable. For a long time I bought into the idea that once women had to come to a certain age and level of experience parity would naturally be reached. That time is now. And we're at 16%.
With the rise of social conservatism as a political and cultural force I felt the backlash, but I still thought that we were in the midst of inexorable change. (Ironically, I believed it was the advent of birth control that made the difference -- being able to control reproduction was the big game changer.) Now I'm seeing backsliding on reproductive freedom --- and a whole lot of other things, including a sort of misogynistic cruelty I first dealt with when women were trying to break into male dominated jobs in the 1970s. Then I saw this movie, which was based on a true story and saw that it was still going on in the late 80s, virtually unchanged. In recent years, it's bubbled up to the surface online in a big way. This thing never goes away.
A lot of men hate women in a serious, fundamental way. (And they aren't all old guys.) Rush Limbaugh is clearly one of them. He's demonstrated it over and over again for more than two decades, and has been feted as a hugely powerful media and political celebrity that entire time. I think the problem is that this is still such an accepted part of male culture that even decent enlightened men (and women) often don't recognize the milder version when they see it for what it actually is.
This worries me. When you look at what's happening around the globe, it's very easy to see just how possible it is for women's rights to backslide. It's true that it's been most obvious in the middle eastern countries in the grip of Islamic fundamentalism. But our "exceptional" Western democracy is hardly a world leader in feminist achievement:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/16-percenters-female-leadership-is.html
With the rise of social conservatism as a political and cultural force I felt the backlash, but I still thought that we were in the midst of inexorable change. (Ironically, I believed it was the advent of birth control that made the difference -- being able to control reproduction was the big game changer.) Now I'm seeing backsliding on reproductive freedom --- and a whole lot of other things, including a sort of misogynistic cruelty I first dealt with when women were trying to break into male dominated jobs in the 1970s. Then I saw this movie, which was based on a true story and saw that it was still going on in the late 80s, virtually unchanged. In recent years, it's bubbled up to the surface online in a big way. This thing never goes away.
A lot of men hate women in a serious, fundamental way. (And they aren't all old guys.) Rush Limbaugh is clearly one of them. He's demonstrated it over and over again for more than two decades, and has been feted as a hugely powerful media and political celebrity that entire time. I think the problem is that this is still such an accepted part of male culture that even decent enlightened men (and women) often don't recognize the milder version when they see it for what it actually is.
This worries me. When you look at what's happening around the globe, it's very easy to see just how possible it is for women's rights to backslide. It's true that it's been most obvious in the middle eastern countries in the grip of Islamic fundamentalism. But our "exceptional" Western democracy is hardly a world leader in feminist achievement:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/16-percenters-female-leadership-is.html
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