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In reply to the discussion: "We raise girls to cater to the fragile egos of men." [View all]Tansy_Gold
(17,933 posts)And it doesn't matter whether it's a "traditional" two parent household, single parent, same-sex parents, blended family of divorce, cohabiting, whatever. The type of family doesn't matter at all, and the actual parenting matters very little in the fact of a culture that promotes and maintains and encourages exactly the kind of patriarchal subservience Ms. Adichie describes.
Take a look at Jean Kilbourne's "Killing Us Softly" videos to get some idea of what our mass media flings in our faces day after day after day after day. Take a look, a good look, at every single magazine in the rack at the grocery store check-out. Just look at what's on the covers. And if you think what's inside is any different, I'll sell you ocean front property in Wyoming.
Pay attention to the images and ideas promoted in television, movies, popular music. What products are advertised when you long into your email? How much of what women are told via the popular culture is part of a general over-arching message that "You have to be beautiful. Beauty is more important than brains. Don't be shrill. GET A MAN."
Remember back -- those of you who are old enough but not yet senile -- when the mantra was "children learn what they live" and parents were cautioned not to be too discouraging in what they said to their children and more encouraging? We've been worried for the past week now about how Donald Sterling's horrible racist remarks may affect young African Americans or Latinos/as or children of mixed races. How do you think women feel when we're bombarded constantly with that 77-cents on the dollar meme? Every time a joke is made about it, we're hurt. We bleed a little inside, because we're reminded again that our culture, our economy doesn't value us as much as a man.
It's great that parents tell their daughters they're worth every penny a man is. It's great that parents encourage their daughters to be doctors and lawyers and engineers and geophysicists and secretaries of state and speakers of the house.
What's not so great is when people who really ought to know better sit here in smirking denial of something far too many of us live with constantly, every single fucking day of our lives.
Pope Francis is held up as such a wonderful reformer! He's not a bigot! He's moving the Roman Catholic Church forward! Bull fucking shit. He's still leaving women as second class worshipers, unfit to be priests, unfit to be anything other than healthy incubators. That, too, is part of the culture, even for non-Catholics, even for atheists, that continuously treats women as subservient to men.
Most of you don't have a clue, or not much of one. You think because YOU don't raise YOUR daughter that way that that's all you have to do. You think because YOUR daughter or YOUR sister or YOUR wife or YOUR girlfriend has a good job that all the patriarchal crap has gone away and you don't have to do anything else. You think because you can point to one shred of anecdotal evidence that it's all hunkey dory and you can go back to business as usual.
Men's reproductive rights are sacred. Viagra and Cialis and whatever other little pills are out there are as holy as a sanctified communion wafer. A woman's body in this country still belongs, in most cases, to the men in her life, whether it's her husband who has to sign off on a tubal ligation, a parent who has to approve birth control pills, a pharmacist who has the power to withhold Plan B, a judge who closes the only abortion clinic in 250 miles, a legislature that tells her she can't even get an abortion because she has no value except as a uterus-with-fetus.
Over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day, women and girls in this country are assaulted with the messages, subtle and not so subtle, that we are not worth as much as a man, and that therefore men are worth more. ANY man is worth more.
A rapist is sentenced to 30 days in jail because his 14-year-old victim is deemed an accomplice in her own victimization. Yes, there's outrage on DU, and yes, the sentencing is now being revisited and the rapist may have to serve two years. But the fact that a judge -- a JUDGE, for the love of all that's decent -- would hold a 14 year old girl as an accomplice in her own rape ought to tell you something about how pervasive the mindset is that women are here to serve men.
Does every man believe that? Maybe not. And there are good and fair men out there, no question.
But you cannot be good and fair and then deny the evidence that is around you all the time that the message is still the same as it was: Woman is less than man, woman is here to serve man.
Don't bother to start with the whole "fathers' rights" crap with me; I won't engage you. I have no respect for that any more than most of the FR crowd has any respect for women. Don't defend the Catholic Church or any other "faith" that denies women (or gays or anyone else) full personhood.
Chimamanda is correct, and she's not just talking about Africa or Muslim culture, the "third world" or uneducated women or any other subset. She speaks for all of us.
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