Misogyny, Guns, Rape and Culture..

Really?

Who is doing that?

Has anyone threatened to take away people's guns? There is the demand that violent criminals and the mentally ill should not be allowed to own guns. Do you mean that officials and lobbyist should stop trying to take their guns away?

But who is trying to take your guns away?

All I see is this butt clenching panic at the mere thought of restricting access to certain people in the population, people who really should not go anywhere near a firearm. Yet, the moment talk of restricting access to such individuals, everyone seems to believe their rights to own guns is being stripped of them. Why is that? There was some talk of restricting access to military style weapons or having gun checks and requirements on how to keep such weapons and people protested about that as well.

So people knew what they wanted and expected. A population does not remain static, unmoving. People change, society changes. I am fairly certain your forefather's never intended your right to bear arms to entail causing terror and fear in the unarmed. And yet, this is now legal and a normal part of protesting in some parts of your country.

Is that the image you got from it?

People knew what they wanted. So many were injured or killed, that something had to be done about it. And so they did. It was the same thing with guns. We had a very conservative Government in power in Australia at the time. Even in my now home state of Queensland, which gun ownership was fairly common, especially amongst farmers. And the Conservative State premier also responded to the calls and demands from the population that something had to be done. And they did it, with overwhelming support. And we haven't had a mass shooting since. And this was after a plethora of mass shootings in Australia. Enough was enough.

Nope. Just as there was nothing to prevent people from speeding before laws about speeding were introduced. Same with seat belts, drink driving, etc.

And yet, would you argue against such laws?

 

Roughly one-third of Americans say that they or someone else in their home owns a gun. The average number of people per home is slightly less than three.

It's reasonable to assume that some of those people say there's a gun in their home in the hope of scaring away burglars or other criminals, without having to actually own one of the fucking goddamned things.

Anyway, a rough estimate would be that ten percent of Americans do own one or more.

Since there are almost as many guns in this country as people, that would mean that the average gun owner has ten.

 

A good woman knows her place..

“When did it happen when men and husbands became doormats?” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy asked a guest on Monday morning in a segment Fox News called, “Husband Appreciation: Sage Advice For Wives.”

What followed was a litany of tips for how a woman can become “the good wife” and “keep your husband happy” from Susan Patton, the so-called “Princeton Mom” who attracted considerable attention in 2013 after penning a letter to her alma mater encouraging young women spend 75 percent of their college career focused on finding a husband.

The controversial author criticized today’s women for “acting like such an entitled princess” and prioritizing careers ahead of their families. Men, Patton told the Fox hosts, must be appreciated and respected, perhaps with a drink at the end of a long work day or gratitude and kindness. After all, should a woman alienate her husband, she’ll spend the rest of her life searching for a suitable replacement. ​

Heaven forbid you send your daughter to college to get an education. Ms Patton suggests her college days should be spent finding a husband. Who needs an obedient puppy!

Apparently the goal is to marry young and to stay married. Because once a woman reaches her 30's, it's all down hill for that plow horse..

“If you are in your mid-30s or older the idea that you’re going to find yourself another husband, almost impossible,” Patton predicted. “And if you don’t believe me ask your maiden aunt, she will tell you when she’s done feeding the cats.” ​

If that was not bad enough, she then went on. Blaming society's unappreciative views on men on feminism, she then whines that society is too sensitive to the needs and rights of women. Her views on rape are particularly telling:

In one particularly strange example, Patton has complained that the rape that occurs between acquaintances — commonly referred to as “date rape” — should be called “mistake sex” to avoid diminishing “the true horror of rape.”

“Good advice,” Doocy beamed at the end of the Fox segment. ​

It should be noted that Ms Patton is recently divorced. I am sure the irony will not escape anyone.

 

The chronology may have been different in your country. But over here, the post-war economic boom made higher education affordable for a great many people. University admissions exploded, as state universities frantically constructed new campuses in towns that were growing into cities.

Girls especially became a much more common sight on campuses, and many boys-only colleges became coeducational. Many of the female students ended up in the traditional female career: education. School construction was barely keeping up with the Baby Boom, so with a degree in almost anything, it was not hard to get a teaching credential.

But there was another vector in campus life. Boys who were studying to be physicists or engineers got accustomed to the banter of their academic community. When they went to the campus dance on Saturday night, many of them were more attracted to the girls who could talk intelligently about Renaissance literature, the politics of the Cold War, or even nuclear physics, than the girls who wandered in from the external community and seemed, in comparison, to be a time-warp back to high school.

Thus many of the female students ended up marrying the male students. They joked about having gotten their "MRS" degree.

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Many of their husbands continued into graduate school, so the wives ended up working to support the family. They called this their "PHT" degree: "Putting Hubby Through."

Now of course I need to balance this exaggerated view of America after the Baby Boom (1946-64). The feminist movement, or "Women's Lib(eration)," arose around that time. So there were, indeed, a great many young women in graduate school who had no intention of marrying young. Even those who only had bachelor's degrees often found careers in "knowledge work" like the booming information technology industry.

But back to the initial premise, there was indeed a strong current of female students who went to college in order to find a husband with good earning power. I'm sure there are still plenty today.

And hell, if those men and those women are happy together and can build strong, healthy families, who are we to criticize? Different strokes for different folks.

After all, there are quite a few families with the opposite configuration: a woman with a degree making good money and supporting her husband while he writes his novel or attempts to break into the music industry.

 

She wrote the letter in 2013. Because according to her, a woman can only be worth something if she is married and has babies and cares for her family. Hence going to college or university should be about finding a husband. Education comes second. And women who strive for a career are 'entitled princesses' because they are not interested in finding a husband while in their early 20's and start popping out babies and waiting patiently at home for the hard working man with a drink ready for him when he walks through the door..

In this day and age?

We all laugh at the advertisements dating from the 30's, 40's and 50's of the good little wife, the obedient wife. I would like to think we have moved beyond that where women have a choice.

Patton is also inherently stupid in that in today's economy, most women have to work and have a career of any sort, if she wants to feed her family and keep a roof over their heads. And frankly, telling women they should not have both or telling women who choose to focus on their career entitled princesses because they aren't at home waiting for their husband with a drink in hand like a trained puppy dog waits for its master with slippers, this is what conservatives believe women should be doing? Choice? What's that?

 

It's important to understand that there really, truly, are women who think that way. Sexism is not just a plot by male chauvinist pigs.

In the Paleolithic Era (which covers 94% of our species's tenancy on this planet) women had to center their lives around pregnancy and nursing. The reason was that up until the late 19th century (and we're now covering 99.9% of our tenancy on this planet) infant mortality was 80%. If the women of a tribe didn't keep having and raising babies constantly, the tribe stood a real chance of dying out.

A woman who is pregnant, nursing, and/or leading a couple of toddlers around is no good on a hunting expedition. So women became the gatherers and focused their lives on motherhood.

That's an awful lot of history to overcome. Instead of snarking at the (surprisingly small) cohort of women who are still faithful to their Stone Age programming, we should be celebrating the ones who have managed to overcome it.

We've too often seen what happens when men succumb to their caveman instincts. They start wars. All women want to do, when their Inner Cavewoman takes control, is stay home and bake cookies.

I don't know about you, but if we're going to try to wean the human race off of its Stone Age habits, I think we should start with the men.

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Don't argue with me; tell it to the historians. That 80% figure appears consistently everywhere I see the subject brought up.

In the Iron Age, cities grew so large that the surrounding farms could not grow enough meat and dairy products to feed the population, and in any case the distances were so great that draft animals pulling wagons couldn't deliver it before it started going bad. So everyone except the aristocrats switched to a grain-intensive diet. Since they knew nothing about vitamins and minerals, the deficiencies killed them. In the later centuries of the Roman Empire, the life expectancy of a citizen who had managed to survive into adolescence was 24.

America was different, since our forefathers had the sheer luck to establish their country in a region that had never before hosted a civilization. The abundance of minerals, topsoil, lumber and clean water allowed Americans to build communities with more space. So malnutrition was not a problem, and contagious diseases did not spread as quickly as in the teeming cities of Europe and Asia.

But in the rest of the world, children continued to die before puberty, so they couldn't do their part to maintain the population. Walk through an ancient cemetery that's no longer in use and notice the large number of tiny gravestones--and how many dead children were disposed of in other ways by people who couldn't afford cemetery plots?

It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that this trend began to reverse due to three vectors.

• One was science: vaccines, antibiotics, asepsis and all the rest of modern scientific medicine.
• One was engineering: covered sewers, fresh water pumped into every home.
• And the third, surprisingly, was commerce. Wrapping food made it more attractive to the shoppers, but it also kept diseases from being spread. Yet, counterintuitively, one of the greatest advances in public health was the automobile! By the end of the century, the streets of all major cities were shin deep in horse manure, which attracted flies and the vermin that hunt them.

You've bungled your math. The average age of death in the Paleolithic Era was about five. When archeologists and anthropologists talk about people typically living into their 50s, they are talking about people who survived childhood.

And, surprisingly and disappointingly, the primary cause of death for adults was violence--as was recently discovered by reexamining ancient skeletons with modern instruments. When hunting and gathering is the only way you can feed yourself, a year of low rainfall equates to a famine. Tribes had to encroach on each other's hunting and gathering territory, and ended up fighting for sheer survival.

Like the anthropologists and archeologists themselves, you've overlooked the famine cycle. Sure, in the more common bountiful years the tribes had summer festivals during which they traded inventions, stories, songs, recipes (especially for booze

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) and *ahem* quite a bit of DNA to "keep the gene pool chlorinated." But in the dry years that popped up at least once in every decade, neighboring tribes became mortal enemies.

But women don't hop. They just keep a steady pace. During the lulls between outbreaks of sympathy for the Afro-Americans, the poor, the LGBT community, the handicapped, the immigrants and any other group I overlooked, women keep making steady progress.

In U.S. civil service, which is a major employment sector when you combine federal, state and municipal jobs with all the (apparently now literally) uncountable consulting firms, women have achieved parity, if not an actual majority.

Here in Maryland, the "bluest" state in the Union, I find it very difficult to get a woman to complain about her lot. Not because she doesn't want to be a complainer, but because it takes her a while to think of something she feels is unfair.

From Reason magazine 2010407:

When you have to pee in a room where men go, you're likely to bring some friends to block the door. Once that becomes a social custom, it's embedded in our culture.

 

Women's rights, when it comes to issues like abortion, do not rate highly in Ireland. Recently a young woman died after complications during a miscarriage, which the medical staff refused to treat because there was still a foetal heartbeat. Since that tragedy, there has been a push in Ireland to relax its anti-abortion laws so that pregnant women, at risk of death due to illness or a complication or through miscarriage or suicide, can obtain an abortion. Each case is decided on a case by case basis and a panel of 3 doctors hand down their findings, which apparently must be unanimous amongst the 3 doctors. Before that happens, the woman has to be questioned and examined by a variety of doctors, all of whom are able to apply their own personal feelings into their decision..

I would imagine most would agree that forcing a woman to remain pregnant, against her wishes and if it is driving her to the point of suicide, is a horrific thing. Not so for the Irish authorities. A teenager, applied to the Government, to be given the right to have an abortion after she discovered she was 8 weeks pregnant. The young woman, an immigrant who spoke little English, was the victim of a traumatic rape and the pregnancy was the result of that rape.

The young woman was traumatised and depressed and suicidal. Now, this should be a fairly clear cut case. Here was a young rape victim, pregnant as a result of her rape, suicidal and very depressed and who did not want to carry the off-spring of her rapist and give birth to it. No one can fault this woman for applying for an abortion the moment she found out she was pregnant at 8 weeks..

The Irish edition of The Sunday Times reports that the woman first discovered she was pregnant at about eight weeks and, as the victim of a “traumatic rape,” immediately began the process for obtaining a mental health exemption to Ireland’s abortion law. Since she is not a citizen of Ireland, she couldn’t travel to another European country to end the pregnancy.

After the woman was examined by two psychologists and one obstetrician, both psychologists agreed she was having suicidal thoughts that put her life at risk. But the obstetrician determined her fetus was viable and should be delivered.​

What the panel of 3 doctors hearing the case then did to her, is, in every sense of the word, appalling. To make sure she continued with the pregnancy, they delayed releasing their findings.. For 17 weeks. Here was a case of a young suicidal rape victim who was still a minor, who wished to abort the foetus that was there solely because she had been brutally raped. They waited 17 weeks to make sure that the foetus was viable when they handed down their ruling. By which point, she was 25 weeks pregnant.

The request for an abortion was denied.

So, she went on a hunger strike, whereupon she was taken to court to be forced to be re-hydrated because of the risk it posed to the foetus and then given the choice to have a c-section, which she accepted under duress of all she had endured.

There is one thing that suicidal rape victims need: immediate assistance. But for one young woman in Ireland who was pregnant and seeking an abortion after reportedly being attacked, the only thing her government offered was the slow, bureaucratic violation of her humanity.

The unnamed woman, now 18, was reportedly raped as a minor and sought an abortion just eight weeks into her pregnancy. Even after experts found her to be suicidal – a prerequisite for abortion under a new Irish law – she was denied access to the procedure. According to a report by the Sunday Times, the woman, who is not an Irish citizen, believes that the government deliberately delayed her case – both through the state’s decision to ignore psychiatric experts and via her inability to travel because of her legal status – so that she would have to carry the pregnancy at least through the fetus’s viability. After going on a hunger strike, she was forced to undergo a caesarean section at just 25 weeks into her pregnancy.​

Here we have a young traumatised and depressed teenage rape victim, who became pregnant as the result of her rape, who was then forced to undergo questioning, examination by different doctors, all to see if she would be eligible to terminate her pregnancy. They then force her to wait 17 weeks, deny her request and then take her to court because they feared for the safety of the foetus. At no time did they care about her or what happened to her.

The process to apply for an abortion is obscene. And it is all based on the whim and personal feelings of the doctors who conduct the examinations.. Quite a few of them in fact.

O'Keane, a consultant psychiatrist for more than 21 years, said because there was no national body to rule on these cases vulnerable women were left "at the mercy of a local, moral and political lottery. They could come up against anti-choice physicians who in effect become conscientious obstructors to abortion."

She added: "The repeated examination of a woman's mental state by at least four doctors, and possibly seven, the repeated questioning specifically about suicidal ideation and intent, will not only be overly invasive, confusing and distressing emotionally, it will also be time-consuming in a period of crisis when a suicidal woman needs access to a termination as soon as possible."

She called the guidelines "completely inappropriate". "I would have preferred a national review panel to make these decisions because Ireland is a small country," she said. "It would have been better in terms of privacy and access to mental health professionals who are committed to enacting the spirit of the legislation. We have a very strong anti-choice lobby in psychiatry and there should have been procedures put in place to allow women to bypass them and their moral, political, theocratic obstacles."

O'Keane pointed out that the section called "Risk to life from Suicidal Intent" means pregnant women have to state explicitly that they are going to kill themselves before being considered for a termination.

"This is very bad practice because if psychiatrists are practising within these guidelines then that will be the stipulation, that the woman in question must state that. Yet in the majority of cases of suicide that psychiatrists deal with there is no stated intention of killing themselves.

"The terms of reference are too narrow and dangerous, and we in Ireland have very high rates of suicide and even a government drive to reduce suicide numbers. In these guidelines, what we are actually doing is saying to Irish women, 'You have to actually tell us that you're going to kill yourself or you won't get that abortion.' It is completely contrary to good psychiatric practice."​

Now imagine a young suicidal teenage rape victim having to go through this and then be rejected after being forced to wait 17 weeks (up to the point of viability, what a surprise there).. And then given the choice of a c-section to save the foetus or be forced to carry it to term..

I don't think misogyny is even the correct word to use here.

Sick and twisted as fuck, maybe.

 

How ironic that it is the Christian right that supports 'more guns' in the US and also demand that women lose their rights in the US....

And how ironic that women in non gun-toting countries were the ones who were given the right to vote, even before the 'gun toting' women in the US..

 

Considering how you've been getting away with it for years against Muslims and Islam (remember your vapid responses to the '9/11 Mosque?'), that is kind of funny coming from you. Let me guess, you're Catholic today? Still teetering on the fence as to what you will be? Or do you just make that decision based on what you wish to pick on to complain about?

Now, are you going to argue that the laws in Ireland, when it came to forcing this teenage rape victim to remain pregnant until she was viable, is not based on the country's Catholic beliefs? Because if you are, then you had best get on with it. Since, in case it escaped your notice, Ireland is very much a Catholic country. They tried to divorce themselves from the Catholic Church because of how the Bishops acted and because they spent so many years trying to hide and protect priests who raped children in the country, but their laws are very very supportive of the Church's beliefs. So much so that they were willing to let a woman die as she miscarried, because to treat her would be to kill the foetus she was miscarrying, as it still had a heartbeat. So they let her continue with the miscarriage, which became infected, the infection entered her bloodstream and caused organ failure and she ultimately died, days later when a simple D&C when she presented with a clear miscarriage would have saved her life. Normal treatment for a miscarriage is surgery, a D&C to prevent infection and to save the woman's life and her uterus. Catholic Ireland? Let her fester for days, because there was still a foetal heartbeat. This new case highlights just how Catholic the laws still are.

And the response from the Catholic Church to this horror story, provides the sequel to the horror story:

It's bad enough to be raped. To then be forced to continue to carry your rapists child, then strapped down and force fed and force hydrated because the authorities want to care for and protect the off-spring of your rapist while ignoring your psychiatric care (the psychiatrists on the board agree that she was suicidal and needed an abortion after her ordeal), and then given the choice of major surgery to remove 'the baby' or forced to carry on to full term.. There are literally no words for the religious doctrines that led to this kind of horror.

And you want to whine that Tiassa said the word "Catholic"?

Really GeoffP? This is what is happening and your complaint is not about that, but because you feel Tiassa generalised when he used the word "Catholic"? Your priorities are somewhat warped, aren't they?