This is a guest post by Echo Zen. Echo is a feminist filmmaker, animator and women’s health advocate, currently deployed in the States to counter the influence of Tea Party moppets. When ze’s not doing ad consulting for birth control, ze tries to blog semi-regularly for Feministe (partly to set a good example for zir sister).
Note: The following is a retrospective on SlutWalk, slated to be delivered to attendees of the anniversary of our city’s SlutWalk. They were written prior to Rep. Todd Akin’s accidental publicisation of his party’s “sluts deserve rape” values.
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Thank goodness the anti-women lobby in the U.S. has finally disposed of its dog whistles.
Ten years ago the opposition used to speak in coded language about how their attacks on women’s sexual equality were about “protecting women” from themselves, promoting “a culture of life” – because everyone knows that without guidance from wise, misogynist politicians, women just aren’t smart enough to make personal decisions about their own sexuality. Today the opposition has dispensed with its dog whistles entirely, and taken to openly smearing women who dare to exercise control over their health and reproductive rights as sluts and threats to the moral foundation of America. (They’ve also said pretty rude things about the LGBT community, but… one thing at a time.)
Back in 2011, a police officer speaking at a Toronto law school attempted to lecture students on how not dressing like sluts would somehow cause people to assault them less. Back in 2011, the word “slut” was used primarily to attack women who sleep with more than one partner in their lifetimes, or who choose to be sexual instead of just sexy. Fast-forward to 2012, where “slut” has entered the political discourse as a way to attack anyone – from Georgetown law students testifying for equal insurance coverage, to Planned Parenthood patients being smeared as “hookers” on Fox News – who dare to stand up for their rights as human beings.
For years the anti-women lobby pretended their attacks on gender equality were really about looking out for women’s best interests… by forcing them back into their “proper” role as submissive housewives. Now, with the Tea Party extremists in control of Capitol Hill, the misogynists have come out of their closet to proclaim with crystal clarity their motivation for attacking women’s right – namely that they hate women who dare to have sex for themselves without being punished with pregnancy or STIs. In the words of Rick Santorum, America’s economic woes aren’t due to corporate corruption or the destruction of America’s middleclass. It’s because “you can’t have a strong economy” if people don’t live “good, moral” lives, if women keep “undermining the traditional family” by being career-driven sluts who use contraception, instead of surrendering themselves to their husbands’ authority.
That a presidential candidate was able to run a serious campaign on an anti-birth control platform should be a lesson to all of us about the importance of speaking out, even for something as ostensibly mainstream as the right to our own bodies. Over 99 percent of sexually active women have used birth control in their lifetimes – and as usual, sadists like Santorum side with the 1 percent.
In a way, it’s no surprise this decade echoes the anti-women backlash of the 1980s. Many of you remember that period as the era when the GOP went from supporting to condemning the Equal Rights Amendment, when politicians attacked working women for causing “America’s decline as a world power,” when grassroots misogynists were driven to such a fury by women having access to lifesaving abortion healthcare that they murdered women’s health providers in their own clinics.
On the bright side though, it was a more honest time, when anti-women politicians openly voiced their opposition to criminalising marital rape, and religious leaders publicly opposed legislation to stop domestic violence. The 1990s was when the anti-women lobby realised unrestrained misogyny was bad publicity, and repackaged itself under the guise of wanting to protect women. And for decades, the ruse worked.
Not until the Tea Party took power in 2010 did the opposition finally dispense with its coded words and revert to their true selves. Now we see senators in Wisconsin proposing laws to label single parenthood as “child abuse”, half of Capitol Hill opposed to reauthorising the Violence Against Women Act, and pundits on Fox News attacking women veterans for demanding justice after supposedly being “raped too much.”
But you know what? Maybe the U.S. media are starting to understand. For decades they’ve attempted to frame attacks on women as being about “religious freedom,” “limited government” or “protecting the unborn.” Now that the opposition has dropped its mask, the media see anti-choice prosecutors across America twisting domestic violence laws intended to protect pregnant women, and using them to prosecute women who’ve had miscarriages. They see religious extremists in North Carolina celebrating their success at restricting women’s access to lifesaving contraception, after claiming in public that this was about “religious freedom.” They see nurses in New Jersey refusing to even touch abortion patients or walk them out the clinic after recovery, claiming that being around these sluts violates their consciences.
These attacks reflect a transparent belief among misogynist legislators – that women who dare to have sex for themselves, rather than as breeders for their husbands, deserve to die.
That is why we need SlutWalk – and you. You are the key to fighting these assaults on basic human decency. We cannot afford another Michigan election, where the anti-women lobby won because, for the first time in state history, men voted just as frequently as women – and they voted for misogyny. Had women voted as frequently as they historically have, we would have won – but in this political climate, we need more than a majority to counter the vocal, extremist and violent minority that seeks to punish women who believe in being judged not by what they do between their legs but by their dreams and achievements.
That means pushing friends and neighbours from passive supporters to active advocates, until our society reaches a point where attacking birth control is considered socially unconscionable, where rape apologists are given the same respect as white supremacists, where opposition to human equality is considered political suicide. The opposition played its hand by dropping its dog whistles and broadcasting its misogyny for the entire country to see. Now it’s time to play our hand. Will SlutWalk be a one-time event or a conscious daily struggle to you? The choice is yours. SlutWalk’s future is in your hands.
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To my friend Allison – for keeping me afloat when the burnout creeps in.
I disagree that misogyny was ever anything but open from the very dawn of the West. When Plato built on Plutarch’s romantic lies about Sparta in the Republic, he decided that women would be part of the property held in common. The genteel patrician fascists of the Enlightenment built on this – see, for example, Diderot’s Supplemente au voyage de Bougainville. I would suggest that
Sorry, pressed the send button by accident!
I disagree that misogyny was ever anything but open from the very dawn of the West. When Plato built on Plutarch’s romantic lies about Sparta in the Republic, he decided that women would be part of the property held in common. The genteel patrician fascists of the Enlightenment built on this – see, for example, Diderot’s Supplemente au voyage de Bougainville. Some of Marx’s contemporaries took the same view.
I would suggest that “slut” and related terms like “that sort of girl” refer in this context to women who refuse to self-categorise as property, the term stretching from eye-candy at one end of the scale to slave at the other.
I didn’t think that Echo Zen was arguing that misogyny has never been blatant before, but rather that after a decade and a half of the right wing pretending to respect women’s rights, we’re in a new stage of virulent misogyny. I don’t know whether I necessarily agree with that assessment, but it seems odd to go back to Plato (and even odder to choose Plato as your representative greek misogynist rather than Aristotle, but…)
It does feel like 2012 has been a particularly bad year, though.
Not to be all “gotcha” to Gerry and miss the actual point, but… Plato lived like 500 years before Plutarch.
EchoZen, this is a great post and I very much agree with it.
I just finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent Atlantic article about racism and Barack Obama’s presidency, in which he talks at some length about how racism has been an integral part of America’s national identity for much of its long history.
I feel like, right now, we’re getting a sharp reminder of just how integral sexism and institutionalized woman-hating is integral to the conservative movement in the U.S., if not the U.S. as a whole. It all hangs together – the preservation of a kind of ideal “Judeo-Christian” republic through the control of women, and through women of families and the ways in which young Americans are brought up.
Ironically the advances women had threw them back as well. Apparently when it was only hard working exhausted men who couldnt be assed to vote, now its hard working exhausted women too.
Because women were never hard working or exhausted in all of history until just a few years ago.
Frankly, I’m glad they’re out in the open. They’ve been hiding behind cuddly words like “women’s best interests” for too long, and in many ways, that makes them more dangerous (“how can you call him a misogynist when he said he’s looking out for your interests, you bitter, ugly feminazi?”). Now that the Right’s war on women has risen to comic-book villian proportions, it’s at least a lot easier to win the support of moderates.
I agree with what you’re saying in this article.
I wonder if the concern-trolling “cuddly” misogyny of the 90′s has anything to do with the lack of young women claiming the feminist label. It seems like it’s easier to take a strong stance in the face of blatant opposition rather than sneaky “but we’re only looking out for your interests!” arguments. Certainly most women my age (20) feel that “feminist” has a strange ring to it, suggesting that you’re easily offended and kind of a shrew; maybe it’s because we’ve grown up in a culture of patronizing rather than hateful rhetoric.
@ch – thank you, I wish somebody had gone “gotcha!” 20 years ago, as that’s how long I’ve been carrying that misperception around in my head!
Imo it has to do with the demografics. The average age of the population is 35 years. So many of the voting men are going through a divorce or went through a divorce, the majority of which has been initiated by women.
I am not saying that American men revenge vote at the ballot box, but at the very least they do not care about women issues if they think of their divorce and dissatisfactions and the like.
While I am convinced that a younger voting public would be kinder and more idealistic, the fact that you can choose between just 2 parties basically does not help either. Many people simply disregarded womens issues and made other points their top priority. If, for whatever reason, you want to see the democrats replaced, then your only other option are the republicans. So the republicans can still get elected even if people are not okay with their attitude towards women, simply because people are not okay with republicans and want something else.
not okay with democrats and want something else I meant to say.
Yeah, by far the biggest challenge in writing retrospectives like this is the difficulty in finding sources you can link to, for folks who didn’t come of age back when anti-women extremists did their public re-branding. It might be common knowledge to Jill and me, for instance, that the 1980s GOP attacked domestic violence laws as being part of a “war on the traditional family or on local values.” But very few sources from the 1980s are online for younger generations (like mine) to see for themselves. Heck, that “war on the traditional family” quote I just mentioned? It’s not on any of the world’s 650 million websites — in fact I was only able to find it through an archived report on Google Books, and even then that was the only report on the entire web that mentioned it.
Ironically, the fact that newly mainstreamed extremists are re-fighting so many battles over long- settled issues like rape and domestic violence has actually made retrospective research harder. Before the Tea Party decided VAWA wasn’t a bipartisan issue anymore, it was comparatively easy to find articles from the 1990s about far-right opposition to VAWA. Now that coverage of today’s VAWA fight has pretty much swamped the web, it’s extremely difficult to find such references anymore. I’m still glad today’s extremists are making so publicly clear their hatred of women who aren’t Christian baby-making factories — but it also makes retrospectives much harder to research.
I think the key to educating voters about GOP extremism is to be able to put today’s attacks in proper historical perspective. That’s why Akin’s revelation about the GOP’s pro-rape stance has been such a blessing. For the first time ever, not only are we seeing mainstream coverage of where their vile values originate (hint: feudal times), I’m also seeing public coverage of the fact most states still allow rapists to sue victims for parental rights if victims bear children. That’s something I’ve never been able to discuss with others without facing skepticism or dismissal as some brainwashed feminist. Thank you, Akin!
[...] “Ten years ago the opposition used to speak in coded language about how their attacks on women’s sexual equality were about “protecting women” from themselves, promoting “a culture of life” – because everyone knows that without guidance from wise, misogynist politicians, women just aren’t smart enough to make personal decisions about their own sexuality. Today the opposition has dispensed with its dog whistles entirely, and taken to openly smearing women who dare to exercise control over their health and reproductive rights as sluts and threats to the moral foundation of America. “ Finally, open misogyny is cool (again) - Feministe [...]