the best i can do is relate it to the civil rights movement and suggest that feminist politics - those actual pieces of legislation forwarded and supported by groups which associate themselves with feminist ideals - seem intent on advocating and stopping with institutionalized affirmative action, justified by maintaining that women are actually the weaker gender and need to be protected above and beyond the rights of the "citizen."
1) Re: Civil Rights: Have you ever made a serious and concerted effort to understand black history in the US? (Or American Indian history?) Do you understand the goals and efforts of the Civil Rights movement, as distinct from the minimal policies changes that were deemed acceptable to a virtually all-white federal government at the time, and since? Do you know any specifics about black history, American Indian history, Latino History, & Immigration Law between the years 1870 and 1954 which provide crucial context for the way that the Civil Rights movement played out? Can you explain the significance of, say, the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson as Supreme Court cases, and the way they've served and had to be responded to as the precedents of more recent cases?
If you can honestly answer any of those questions in the affirmative and provide some detailed analysis, I'm willing to engage you further. If not, then I am inclined to believe that you are simply spouting knee-jerk bromides that serve to claim for white men the very "victim" status you wrongly associate with women and non-whites and condemn in movements seeking their equality. Can you understand that that's a problem?
2) Women in the US do not have Constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law. The ERA was defeated using a procedure that has never been used for any other proposed Constitutional amendment.
3) Can you how me a recognized feminist who makes the argument a) that women need to be protected above and beyond the rights of "citizen" b) because women are "the weaker gender"?
3) Does the following argument make any sense to you?: "Citizen" is a term that has historically been defined by white, male, propertyholders, and has been, and remains, shaped according to the norms, typical life experiences, and "common sense" of that group. Most feminists believe it to be in serious need of revision as it comes to deal seriously with women's experience, the experience of pregnancy most particularly, to which men inevitably have a different relationship.
for instance, womens rights advocates argue for abortions without notification requirements because of the existence of abuse, but they dont support arguments that say that abuse needs to be proven, they instead seek blanket protections, making it so that a person needs to provide more personal information in order to buy something on ebay than they do to get an abortion.
First, your flippant final comment: Do you know what it's like to try to get an abortion? Particularly, in, say, one of the 14 states that requires a 24-hour waiting period, or one of the large percentage of counties with no doctor who is qualified to perform the procedure?
Your tone in that statement contributes to the perception that you really have never had a single, empathetic thought for the position of women and mothers. Without any substantive expression of empathy--burdensome as you apparently regard such expressions--it is logical to conclude, again, that you don't want equality but pure patriarchal authority and power over the lives of women and children.
Women's rights advocates argue for abortions without notification because we believe that women need to be considered full citizens who have a right to bodily integrity. Drucilla Cornell, for instance, explains it this way:
What does it mean to deny a woman the right to abortion as a matter of law? It means that she is denied her equivalent worth as a person -- the very moral status that rights are meant in this conception to recognize. Put as strongly as possible: the fact of a woman's sexual difference is used to justify her treatment as a violable object. Since this treatment denies women equality as persons, it denies us the fair conditions of cooperation in which acceptance of any law as rightful could be legitimately imposed upon us.
Being forced to carry a child to term means that your body is being taken over not just by a child, but by the State: at that moment, you cease to exist as anything but a vehicle for the child, and the child's existence is placed over yours. I don't care whether the father of the child is a lover, a husband, or a rapist, no one should be able to say: "I want the eventual baby; force that woman to carry the fetus to term for me, no matter what the cost to her financially, socially, physically, mentally." Bearing a child is a form of labor; forced labor is slavery.
i dont mean to open a can of worms by arguing that point forever and ever, i'm just using that example to demonstrate that feminist politics, i think, has created an unfair and unnecessary imbalance in how women and men are treated in our legal system.
And I am saying, again, that you are creating a "straw man" version of feminism to argue against, one based on media misrepresentations of feminism, and, even when this is pointed out to you, you refuse to engage with real feminism. This is not just poor argumentation, it is unethical argumentation. |
