160 Million Missing Females: PRENDA and Misogyny

[redqueen]

Last edited Sun Jun 3, 2012, 11:36 AM - Edit history (1)

http://www.fem2pt0.com/2012/06/01/sex-selective-abortions-missing-women-and-the-prenda-bill/

Because of gender bias and sex discrimination, there are an estimated 160,000,000 girls and women missing from the planet today. This isn't man-bashing or "victim feminism," by the way. It's just a documented statement of fact. By virtually any measure, this is dystopian.

(snip)

The immorality in question isn't in the use of tools to select babies, it is in the use of misogyny to inform culture and mandate the elimination of girls in preferences for boys.

In order to address the sex ratio imbalance we have to acknowledge and challenge the root causes, namely dehumanization and elimination of female humans. Yesterday it was drowning newborn girls, today it is spinning them out of potential birth, tomorrow it will be something new. Abortion, nuanced as it is, is just a stop on the way. Anything short of addressing girls' and women's inequality as humans is an ineffectual and more often than not, patriarchal Band-Aid and will do nothing. It's the proverbial rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. That is why this morning's cynical Republican indignation over the US House of Representatives's rejection of the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act is self-serving and disingenuous. Girls and women wouldn't need so much sanctimonious and hypocritical "protecting" if they had cultural equality and human dignity.

(snip)

And, yes, men and women are making the choice to sex select for males. I use that word provisionally -- it's impossible to freely and autonomously "choose" when your existence is filtered from birth through patriarchal cultural norms that mean you experience your gender as a form a trauma. When your very nature is considered defective it skews your perspective.

...

"It is impossible to freely and autonomously "choose" when your very existence is filtered from birth through patriarchal cultural norms that mean you experience your gender as a form of trauma."

Quote of the century, right there.



Also, the "tattooed with bar codes" hyperlink is broken in the story. There are a few stories on HuffPo about it, here is one.


Also also, lest anyone think the whole 'women as products for sale' thing is only outside the US, think again. (I dislike Kristof's style of writing about these issues in general, but at least he's hitting some of the major issues about prostitution and trafficking here.)

[BlueIris]

1. That number is unavoidably ugly.

It is just awful.

[dana_b]

2. that is a great quote

and it really ties these articles together. 160,000,000 women are (as they point out in the article) approximately the amount of females we have in the U.S. holy cow! And now the women who are being imported into these developing countries usually through no choice of their own) face lives of servitude.

Someone at Huffington Post pointed out that the women who were branded should not be referred to as prostitutes. They have become slaves. It's true. Nothing in their lives is under their control. Horrifying.

Of course the holier than thou repubs have to jump on this and say that they are protecting female babies(“we’ll save the girls”) by trying to outlaw sex elective abortions here in the U.S. Manipulating the situation for their own agenda. What a surprise..