International Women's Day: Sigh

March 8th is International Women's Day. It's a day to focus attention on the advances made by women, and the distance still to be travelled, in a world where fundamental issues of justice, health, rights and power tip deeply in favor of men.

A Fledgling Waiting for a Meal (photo by Jan)

The word "International" is important, because structures of power - legal and cultural - skew differently around the world. The most extreme, as I experienced it, was during my first visits to the new nation of Bangladesh in the early 1970s. Outside of the capital, I never once saw female human beings older than about 8 years old, anywhere. I was told that women were to be locked in the house by their male relatives as they left, and no one would open the door, even in a fire, on the assumption that it is better to die pure than risk being defiled by the touch of an unrelated male.

And those sorts of statements were told to me by my own Bangladeshi staff, who were regarded as progressive.

One of the roles played by these kinds of stories, though, can be to hold up our own societies as oh-so-advanced in the face of those foreign outrages. And in most places in the US, locking someone up in a house because of her sex would be a crime. But as citizens of this country, participants in this culture, we need to keep our attention on our own problems - and the seemingly worsening situation for women in our political life.

As I've been thinking about this, the 2012 slide backwards seems to revolve around  primordial, primitive objectification of women. I started learning to analyze self-serving discrimination by men just when I was graduating from high school, from my mom. She was literally carrying Betty Friedan's book around the house with her - as she did the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and child care. At that time she had never driven a car and had been educated up to the 10th grade. Because of that book and the ones that followed, she created her own life: finishing high school, college, and grad school while still raising her kids on her own.

And the Meal Arrives (photo by Jan)

Forty years later, we're re-fighting old battles over contraception, not to mention abortion. And we have the spectacle of serial philandering by male politicians across the political spectrum - and into other branches of our broad culture, for example, by the former head of the IMF. And we have the "slut" controversy, a junior high school level of discourse.

One way to understand all this is to return to the phrase I mentioned some months ago from futurist Hazel Henderson, about the dangers of the "last thrashings of the dying dinosaur." This is a useful way to view the mouthings of the older white men who predominate in creating and perpetuating sexual regression. It would be a terrible mistake, though, to wait for these boys to just age out, leaving the reins of power to a younger, less bigoted generation. If we did that, we'd be agreeing to the great harm done right now to women by those threatened, intolerant men in power. And we'd be running the risk of living for a generation under the atrocious laws they are working hard to pass, to enshrine their small-mindedness in structures that endure after their passing.

Some of the responsibility also needs to rest, I believe, in the considerable group of women who shifted to the right after Clinton, stayed there during Bush, and became more so with Sarah Palin. Repulsed by Clinton's sexual misconduct and fearful for their family's welfare in a failing economy and their family's safety after 9/11, they supported the conservatives - possibly not fully realizing that they were buying in to a cultural agenda that pushed their own rights under the rug - a rug they were expected to vacuum.

All in all the culture wars are back, just when many of us were breathing a sigh of relief at their waning. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that the group of people opposing the troglodytes is larger and more diverse, including young women and girls who did not grow up with 1950's ideas of women's powerlessness, disaffected conservative women, and a large group of men who experience shared power with women as far better for everyone than a life based on injustice and shame.

How much this sundry group is able to work collaboratively with the accelerating gay rights movement, and with those who have long addressed bigotry against African Americans, hispanics, native Americans, disabled people and other disadvantaged groups - remains to be seen.

There are many reasons to hope that the outrageous over-reaching of gender bigots will work against their attempts to rig the legal system. I hope on March 8, 2013, I'll be able to write a blog entry looking back to those grueling months when we still had sexist bigots, fundamentalist fanatics, and degenerate commentator clowns dominating the news.

Julia Singing Opera for her Supper
On the Street in Paris

Finally, I want to tell you that my daughter Julia shares her birthday with International Women's Day. Dave McReynolds - the only socialist, pacifist, gay person to run for President of the United States (several times) - sent her a tiny War Resisters League T-Shirt a few days after her birth. He somehow knew that Julia would be a person who has never had the desire to just go along with the status quo in any aspect of her life. Like McReynolds, Julia has always done gone against the grain with grace and humor. An opera singer, she lives in New York.

Dave McReynolds, now 83

There may be a father somewhere around the world who is as proud of his daughter as I am of mine, but I'm confident that no father is more proud -