Women: our Form
Reading an article in The Atlantic - The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘She’s Not My Type’ Defense
There is, as always, a certain clarity to Trump’s cruelty. The president seems to understand, on some level, something profoundly true about the creaking mechanics of misogyny: Sexual abuse is not, ultimately, about sexual attraction. It is about power. It is about one person’s exertion of will over another. In this way, “She’s not my type” is deeply entangled with the president’s long-standing habit of dismissing unruly women through his negative assessments of their attractiveness: the women as the sexual commodities, Donald Trump as the discerning consumer.
This is just one example of the ways in which women are presently being reminded that it is not they who define their purpose, their function, and their worth - it is men. Other examples ...
The Equal Rights Amendment, designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, was first introduced almost 100 years ago and still has not been ratified ... in the Catholic church, the pope has declared that women will never be priests and will not even allow them to be deacons, and meanwhile nuns are used as unpaid labor and sex objects for priests ... Republicans and religious conservatives work tirelessly to take away women's constitutionally guaranteed right to decide if they want to be a parent or not.
And it's not just here. Human Rights Watch ...
Despite great strides made by the international women’s rights movement over many years, women and girls around the world are still married as children or trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery. They are refused access to education and political participation, and some are trapped in conflicts where rape is perpetrated as a weapon of war. Around the world, deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are needlessly high, and women are prevented from making deeply personal choices in their private lives.
When Trump, the president of our country, assures us that he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll because she doesn't fall into the group of women he finds attractive enough to rape, and he not only gets away with it but is cheered on by his dead-head horde and supported by his craven Republican allies (Lindsey Graham: “He’s denied it. That’s all I needed to hear.”), the truth we all pretend not to know is reinforced .... we women have a Form and it is set by men. The Form of a fork, the perfect fork fulfilling it's God-given function, a worthwhile fork, is a fork that is really good at picking up food. The Form of a woman, a woman fulfilling her function, one who has worth, is one who is attractive enough to rape (and in default, is useful as a general dogsbody).
It's not fair and it just never seems to end.
There is, as always, a certain clarity to Trump’s cruelty. The president seems to understand, on some level, something profoundly true about the creaking mechanics of misogyny: Sexual abuse is not, ultimately, about sexual attraction. It is about power. It is about one person’s exertion of will over another. In this way, “She’s not my type” is deeply entangled with the president’s long-standing habit of dismissing unruly women through his negative assessments of their attractiveness: the women as the sexual commodities, Donald Trump as the discerning consumer.
This is just one example of the ways in which women are presently being reminded that it is not they who define their purpose, their function, and their worth - it is men. Other examples ...
The Equal Rights Amendment, designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, was first introduced almost 100 years ago and still has not been ratified ... in the Catholic church, the pope has declared that women will never be priests and will not even allow them to be deacons, and meanwhile nuns are used as unpaid labor and sex objects for priests ... Republicans and religious conservatives work tirelessly to take away women's constitutionally guaranteed right to decide if they want to be a parent or not.
And it's not just here. Human Rights Watch ...
Despite great strides made by the international women’s rights movement over many years, women and girls around the world are still married as children or trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery. They are refused access to education and political participation, and some are trapped in conflicts where rape is perpetrated as a weapon of war. Around the world, deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are needlessly high, and women are prevented from making deeply personal choices in their private lives.
When Trump, the president of our country, assures us that he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll because she doesn't fall into the group of women he finds attractive enough to rape, and he not only gets away with it but is cheered on by his dead-head horde and supported by his craven Republican allies (Lindsey Graham: “He’s denied it. That’s all I needed to hear.”), the truth we all pretend not to know is reinforced .... we women have a Form and it is set by men. The Form of a fork, the perfect fork fulfilling it's God-given function, a worthwhile fork, is a fork that is really good at picking up food. The Form of a woman, a woman fulfilling her function, one who has worth, is one who is attractive enough to rape (and in default, is useful as a general dogsbody).
It's not fair and it just never seems to end.
posted by crystal | 9:46 AM
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