(Forgive me if this is a bit rambling. I have no set format for this post other than a stream of consciousness.)
In the Middle East, women are routinely stoned for the crime of getting raped. A father can marry off his 11-year-old daughter to a 50-year-old man for prestige or money. A woman cannot divorce her husband even though he beats and rapes her every night, but a man can divorce his wife if he wants to go after a younger, sexier piece of ass. Women in many of these countries aren’t allowed to drive, show more flesh than the piece of skin between their eyes (and sometimes not even that), or aren’t allowed to leave the house without a male family member “for their own protection”. A husband is allowed to kill his wife if she is thought to have brought any sort of “dishonor” to the household. In court, the testimony of one man is worth that of two women.
In Africa, forced female circumcision has reached horrific rates. Rape is used as a weapon of war. Some African war zones make Iran look like the Netherlands.
In the United States, abortion has become the top conservative issue. Forty-five percent of Americans don’t think a woman should have a right to decide what goes on with her own body. It’s 2011, and women are still paid less than men.
Men, don’t we love women? Don’t we need them to survive? Is mating not the top priority of any non-asexual, non-hermaphroditic species, especially ours? Don’t we have mothers who cared for us when we were sick, and daughters who are made of half our genetic material? Why do we continue to abuse those which are so necessary for our emotional and physical survival?
Someone please explain it to me, because I’m just not understanding the hatred.
Eh - the stoning thing isn’t in all Middle Eastern states, but where it does happen, there’s more to it than just misogyny. Consider: Is there anything that you would consider stoning someone for? Seriously. Would you be willing to slowly torture someone to death by pelting stones at them until blood loss and brain trauma allowed them, mercifully, to expire?
Funny… i was just thinking about this same issue today… Sitting at Starbucks reading Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (his book on the Mormon religion) and my 12 yr old daughter is sitting across from me playing online. I was thinking… OMG people are fucking marrying girls her age off to grown ass nasty men…
Where’d this come from? The teabaggers are definitely more socially conservative than they let on, but all I hear these days is socialism, deficit, and tax cuts.
Well to be fair, getting a PhD usually does have the unwanted side effect of actually lowering your earnings outlook compared to other degrees But I can’t explain it vs lack of high school.
I don’t get it either, but I can offer up a hypothesis.
I think that in many cultures (including our own) feminine sexuality is viewed as dangerous and needs to be contained at all costs. Out of control feminine sexuality will cause men to go loco and do crazy and dangerous things.
The treatment of women by men, in the ME and parts of Africa, confirms to me the cowardice of the men of these regions.
Furthermore, after ten years of reading about the ME post 9/11 I can only conclude that the people of the ME don’t “get it.” From what is in the news all the time.
As an example… the Iranian women’s soccer team will not get to play in the FIFA championship because they refuse to follow the rule of no head scarves. This rule was presented to them without exception no head scarves allowed because of safety reasons. What does Iran do? Ignore the rule. The women are then denied entry to the tournament and now the Iranian team cries about religion. Totally predictable.
And yet as soon as they get voted into congress and state legislatures, we have a slew of anti-abortion bills get passed with almost no job-creation bills made by comparison.
Don’t be fooled, the tea baggers say they’re all about jobs and the deficit because that’s what people in general are worried about now and what will get them elected. But being hateful little assholes, as soon as they get that power, they revert to their standard woman-hating conservative ways
My brother’s theory is that it has to do with lineage and inheritance. Back in the day (before DNA tests), the man couldn’t really be sure that his children were actually his unless he kept the mother under wraps. Or something like that.
Violent Multiple Rapists, confirmed pedophiles, certain murderers [the BTK sort]
I would not only be willing to flip the switch/pull the lever/pull the trigger, I would be willing to personally put them into a 20 ton stamping press set on slow descend and hit the switch on them. Stones are old school.
What’s so hard to understand? It’s the same two reasons anybody does anything- they want to and they can. They want to because suppressing others makes your own status higher. They can because men are stronger, bigger, and can’t be hindered by pregnancy. Is it the ‘want’ or the ‘can’ that you’re unclear about?
But let’s not act like men don’t get treated unfairly, too. We’ve done multiple threads about that. Who do you send off to fight and die for your country? The men or the women? Why, in the United States, are women still not draftable?
Because until quite recently women, even in the Western world have been treated as property of the family. Look up the term ‘dowry’, ok, I’ll do it for you.
These ideas have only disappeared from the Western world a generation or two ago. Marriages arranged by family are still quite common in many areas of the world. If you want me to marry your daughter and join our families for our mutual benefit I will require 1 camel and 2 oxen in addition to your best ass, so to speak.
I am in no way defending these attitudes, just pointing out that the issue is one of cultural evolution not getting there yet and expecting that every country in the world assumes western attitudes is not realistic.
They tend to get pissed off at us over these things.
What, exactly, does this have to do with misogyny? The women want to play wearing their headscarves and they do play and practice daily in their headscarves without any safety issues with them. This is a case of men deciding what women should wear, but not on the part of the Iranians, but on the part of FIFA.
Judging from the sobbing pictures my guess is that the women would have gladly worn some sort of skullcap. But the team management insisted the women wear their usual head scarves.
ps-don’t mean to derail the thread as this is a bit off the basic point of misogyny
But I can’t explain it vs lack of high school.