rainbow@Eng.Sun.COM (queen of infinite space) (12/07/90)
HI - I listen to Pacifica radio here in California (KPFA), and this morning's program discussed the high increase of violence against women. They spoke of another woman jogger out at Inspiration Point in Tilden Park who was killed in daylight by her assailant. Women are no longer safe leaving their houses, and some would add that we're not even safe _in_ our houses. There are marches this weekend nationwide to commemorate the massacre in Monstreal one year ago. The one in San Francisco is called "Take Back the Night" and is for women-only. I pass this on to you, without comment: Reproduced without permission from _On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978_, by Adrienne Rich. ---------------------------------------------------------- This culture of manipulated passivity, nourishing violence at its core, has every stake in opposing women actively laying claim to our own lives. Of all issues on which women around the world are currently moving, the demand for abortion rights has most often been used to distort and distemper the meaning of our movement. Abortion ... is a concrete issue; hardly _the_ issue women would have chosen to symbolize our struggle for self-determination, but one which has been perhaps more mystified, more intellectualized and emotionalized, than any other, and which glares out from the complex spectrum of issues surrounding women's claim to bodily ... integrity. Sexual harassment on the job; women-beating; rape; genital mutilation; pornography; the use of dangerous and/or pacifying drugs on women; equal pay for equal work; the rights of lesbian mothers; the erasure of women from the history ... - these are some of those issues; and most certainly the violent seizure of poor and Third World women's uteruses by the agents of enforced sterilization. I think it is no accident that for all the issues that our movement has been addressing, abortion has become the most visible and emotionally charged of all our efforts to speak for ourselves and defend our own lives. This process, named murder, has been selected to represent the radical feminist struggle as antilife, irresponsible, or ruthless ... . A pornography of antiabortion literature and imagery exists: the fetus who will never disturb a mother's sleep; the fetishism of tiny fingers and toes; the image of the callously death-dealing mother. Feminists have responded to this obscene campaign by demonstrations with coat-hangers, reminding the public of the thousands of women -- mostly poor women and women of color -- who have died and will die of self-abortion or botched illegal abortion. But the imagery of violence persists, whether as inflicted by a women on a fetus or on herself. The institutional and physical violences against women which lead to an abortion decision, which force us to exert our moral and political energies on this issue at all instead of on ways to create a world more livable for the living, remain unnamed and invisible in the rhetoric of the opposition. Philisophical, juridical, and Jesuitical debates over the morality of abortion have long filled the legal and theological casebooks, the texts of medical ethics. Meanwhile, in churches and on the steps of legislatures the issue is aired with the self-righteous emotionalism which once marked the casting out of the unwed mother from the community. Both these forms of the debate are framed in terms of a morality, an ethic, a social conscience which is manmade and male-defined. The questions raised thereby (At what point is a fertilized egg a person? When does the soul start to exist? Shall abortion, if legal, be federally funded?) are inevitably male questions, poised in a world view and an ethical system which has persistently denied moral and ethical value to women, viewing us always as marginal, dubious, or dangerous, and in need of special controls. It is time that we frame our own questions on this as on every other issue... In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, ... In reality, the feminist movement could be said to be trying to visualize and make way for a world in which abortion would not be necessary; a world free from poverty and rape, in which young girls would grow up with intelligent regard for and knowledge of their bodies and respect for their minds, in which the socialization of women into heterosexual romance and marriage would no longer be the primary lesson of culture; in which single women could raise children with a less crushing cost to themselves, in which female creativity might or might not choose to express itself in motherhood. Yet, when radical feminists and lesbian/feminists begin to speak of such a world, when we begin to sketch the conditions of a life we have collectively envisioned, the first charge we are likely to hear is a charge of violence: that we are "man-haters." We hear that the women's movement is provoking men to rape; that it has caused an increase in violent crimes by women; and when we demand the right to rear our children in circumstances where they have a chance for more than mere physical survival, we are called fetus-killers. The beating of women in homes across this country, the rape of daughters by fathers and brothers, the fear of rape that keeps old -- as well as young -- women off the streets, the casual male violence that can use a car to run two jogging women off a country road, the sadistic exploitation of women's bodies to furnish a multibillion-dollar empire of pornography, the decision taken by powerful white males that one-quarter of the world's women shall be sterilized or that certain selected women -- poor and Third World -- shall be used as subjects for ... contraceptive experiments -- these ordinary, everyday events inevitably must lead us to ask: who indeed hates whom, who is killing whom, whose interest is served, and whose fantasies expressed, by representing abortion as the selfish, wilful, morally contagious expression of _woman's_ predilection for violence? -- "whichever way your pleasure tends, if you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind" Rainbow --- Sun Microsystems --- rainbow@sun.com
cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) (12/10/90)
In article <3895@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> rainbow@Eng.Sun.COM (queen of infinite space) writes: >and this morning's program discussed the high increase >of violence against women. They spoke of another woman >jogger out at Inspiration Point in Tilden Park who was >killed in daylight by her assailant. Women are no >longer safe leaving their houses, and some would add that >we're not even safe _in_ our houses. What are the comparative statistics? I thought that the most likely category of person to be assaulted or killed on the street was a teenage male, by a VERY considerable factor. It's certainly the case in the UK, and I thought it was in the US too. -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.aipna +44 31 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
BS1HSANU%MIAMIU.BITNET@ohstvma.ircc.ohio-state.EDU (12/18/90)
I just saw a chart the other day. Black males are far and away the most killed group in America. White females were at the bottom of the list I believe. [This was a chart in this week's (or last) Newsweek showing the *rate* of death by murder among black men, black women, white men, and white women. The rate has remained constant for the last three groups over the last (one or two) decades; it has climbed almost exponentially for black males. Drugs, especially crack, appear to be the main reason. --CLT]
RA04@Lehigh.UCAR.EDU (01/02/91)
An article in Newsweek last year said that a "boy born in Harlem today has a lower life expectancy than a boy born in Bangladesh." I think the expectancy is in the 40's. I suspect that such boys have worse chances to live than average American women, but I wonder . . . what's the expectancy of a black girl born today in Harlem? is anyone doing research like this with sex included as well as geography?