Bah! I meant “the reason why”

Stupid typos.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a poll broken out by gender, but the last time I saw polls that did this, women were no less likely to be anti-choice than their male counterparts (a fact which mystifies me to this day). We can argue all day that this is directly contrary to their own best interests, or discuss why that is, but we shouldn’t pretend that the demographics of belief are different than they are.

But that problem is dwarfed by the male dominance of the anti-woman program of the far right, and more generally by the simple cluelessness of our culture, and especially its male leaders, about women and women’s bodies. We have a culture in which female high school students are punished for simply saying the word “vagina”: a culture in which girls are literally prohibited from speaking the names of parts of their own bodies, the parts that men get flustered over, naturally. We have a culture in which women are encouraged to diet to the point of death to meet imposed standards of appearance – standards not imposed by other women, but reinforced by other women in the competitive hierarchy that earns them rewards for meeting those standards. We have a culture in which almost every aspect of women’s lives is designed around a male model or for men’s convenience, which is why there is almost no support for childcare, no compensation for lost wages or seniority on leaving the work world to raise children, a coordinated assault – by male-led religious groups – on access to both abortion and contraception, and persistent undertreatment of women compared to men for the same diagnoses. We have Bill Frist, David Hager, Charles Krauthammer, Leon Kass, and William Cheshire as highly placed, politically powerful doctors, hell-bent on stripping women of their autonomy, and using the power of the government to do so.

I can’t think why it’s controversial to say that misogynist men have had a negative impact on women’s health. I’ll agree that is not the only impact, but that fact is not the one that catches my attention about the matter.

Really? We know for a fact that no women have absorbed the dominant sexist culture and participated in unnecessary “women’s” operations, no women have participated in sexist ad campaigns, and so on. Happy days. The major project of the the early women’s movement was “consciousness raising.” It’s gratifying to learn that that project was so successful, on tens of millions of women, and there’s been absolutely no backsliding, even with the rise of religious fundamentalism. Groovy, as they said back then.